Constellationscape 6/88 (Ara) Painting

Our collective imaginations once connected the bright lights of the night sky in patterns meaningful to them: gods, heroes, and animals. Their lives are entwined with mythologies, and each culture since prehistory used these patterns to make sense of their lives in this vast universe. Modern astronomy now identifies eighty-eight constellations that mapped the celestial sphere with their continuous boundaries and, with the calculus of a cosmic coordinate system, can specify the position of any celestial object within these constellations. Now we also know that from Earth, each of those objects is so far away that we need to use the speed of light to measure the distance, and every ingredient in our body is made from the elements forged by stars; we are made of star stuff, as Carl Sagan once famously said or Rumi more poetically, we are stars wrapped in skin.