Q1.
Have you ever looked at the stars in the night sky and tried to connect them with imaginary lines, just like dots and lines in a drawing?
Answer
Yes — and that is exactly how people all over the world made the constellations. On a clear, dark night the stars look like bright dots scattered on a black sheet. If you join a few of the brightest dots with imaginary lines, a shape jumps out at you.
- Seven bright stars in the northern sky join up into a giant ladle or cooking spoon. Indians call it Saptaṛiṣhi; in English it is the Big Dipper.
- Three stars in a short, straight, evenly-spaced line in the winter sky form the belt of the hunter Orion.
- A small, hazy cluster looks like a tiny bunch of grapes — the Kṛittikā (Pleiades).
Why our mind does this: the human brain is very good at spotting patterns. Given a random scatter of dots, it keeps trying to fit a familiar shape on to them. The lines are not really in the sky and the stars in a pattern may be at completely different distances from us — they only look close together because they lie in the same direction.
Try This: On the next moonless night, go up to a terrace with an elder, look towards the north and find the ladle shape of the Saptaṛiṣhi. Sketch it in your notebook with a pencil — you have just made your first star map.