Here’s why humans chose particular groups of stars as constellations

[Seldom Bucket]

The Big Dipper’s stars make up a conspicuous landmark in the sky of the Northern Hemisphere. Even novice stargazers can easily pick out the shape, part of the Ursa Major constellation. Now, scientists have shown that three factors can explain why certain groups of stars form such recognizable patterns.


To replicate how humans perceive the celestial sphere, a team of researchers considered how the eye might travel randomly across this night sky. Human eyes tend to move in discrete jumps, called saccades (SN: 10/31/11), from one point of interest to another. The team created a simulation that incorporated the distribution of lengths of those saccades, combined that with basic details of the night sky as seen from Earth — namely the apparent distances between neighboring stars and their brightnesses.


The technique could reproduce individual constellations, such as Dorado, the dolphinfish. And when used to map the whole sky, the simulation generated groupings of stars that tended to align with the 88 modern constellations recognized by the International Astronomical Union, Sophia David and colleagues reported March 18 at an online meeting of the American Physical Society.

Here’s why humans chose particular groups of stars as constellations

Distances between stars, their brightnesses and patterns of human eye movement explain why particular sets of stars tend to be grouped together.

www.sciencenews.org

 

[TabacNW]

Interesting, the human eye. I look at a female nipple, then my eye jumps to one of her eyes and back to the other nipple, that forms a triangle. Same thing happens between nipples and her other eye. Now if you combine those two triangles you'll see another triangle within, which crosses the centre between the female boobs and her neck. That's where the female soul should be, but i don't see it. Reason for shagging the female without feeling guilty afterwards.