I. Constellation A constellation is a recognizable pattern of stars that has official borders and an official designation.

. There are 88 officially recognized constellations. listed by the International Astronomical Union(IAU). No one has named or postulated a new constellation in centuries. Astronomers simply add a newly discovered star to the constellation that it is closest to.

Dont forget that we often recognize star patterns but these are asterisms and not constellations. To be a constellation it has to have official borders and an official designation!

A. First Constellations Ptolemy was an ancient astronomer. In his early work, the Almagest, he listed 48 known constellations. Almagest - a mathematical and astronomical treatise proposing the complex motions of the stars and planetary paths. The book itself was brilliant, covering the problems of daily motion of celestial objects, time spans of daylight, determination of latitude, the points at which the Sun is vertical, the shadows of the sundials gnomon at the equinoxes and solstices, and other observations that change with the spectators position.

The view of the night sky represented was quite a bit limited, but many of those same constellations are still accepted and retain their original names. However, there was only one small problem with the Almagest and its constellations. The charts that Ptolemy used came from Hipparchus time and only included the stars that he could see from his position . It wasnt long until it was improved greatly by the Islamic culture, whose astronomers described observations of the stars, their positions, magnitudes, brightness and color even adding drawings for each constellation. Consequently, even today some of our brightest cataloged stars are still referred to by their Arabic names!

Centaurus is the closest to Earth. The closest star within that constellation is Proxima Centauri at 4.2 light years. That is a mere 39,735,067,984,839.36 kilometers away.

B. The Modern Constellations

Formed in 1919, the International Astronomical Union (IAU) is a collection of professional astronomers whose job it to act as the internationally recognized authority for assigning designations. In 1930 the IAU decided to choose the work of Belgian astronomer, Eugene Joseph Delporte for a worldwide standard. At this point, he fixed the modern boundaries between all of the constellations in the sky, along lines of right ascension and declination for the epoch B1875.0 and the 88 officially recognized constellations went into effect. Because Delport chose such an early epoch for the work of Benjamin Gould, these 80 year old works are no longer perfectly vertical or horizontal thanks to the precession of the equinox, and will one day have to be re-worked. However, a standard was set and constellation names, patterns and borders finally recognized.

II. Galaxies
Our galaxy, the Milky Way, is typical: It has hundreds of billions of stars, enough gas and dust to make billions more stars, and at least ten times as much dark matter as all the stars and gas put together. And its all held together by gravity. Like more than two-thirds of the known galaxies, the Milky Way has a spiral shape.

At the center of the spiral, a lot of energy and, occasionally, vivid flares. are being generated.

Based on the immense gravity that would be required explain the movement of stars and the energy expelled, the astronomers conclude that the center of the Milky Way is a supermassive black hole. Other galaxies have elliptical shapes, and a few have unusual shapes like toothpicks or rings. The Hubble Ultra Deep Field (HUDF) shows this diversity. Hubble observed a tiny patch of sky (one-tenth the diameter of the moon) for one million seconds (11.6 days) and found approximately 10,000 galaxies, of all sizes, shapes, and colors. From the ground, we see very little in this spot, which is in the constellation Fornax. Formation After the Big Bang, the Universe was composed of radiation and subatomic particles. What happened next is up for debate - did small particles slowly team up and gradually form stars, star clusters, and eventually galaxies? Or did the Universe first organize as immense clumps of matter that later subdivided into galaxies? Collisions The shapes of galaxies are influenced by their neighbors, and, often, galaxies collide. The Milky Way is itself on a collision course with our nearest neighbor, the Andromeda galaxy. Even

though it is the same age as the Milky Way, Hubble observations reveal that the stars in Andromeda's halo are much younger than those in the Milky Way. From this and other evidence, astronomers infer that Andromeda has already smashed into at least one and maybe several other galaxies.