Constellations Across Cultures: How Our Visual Systems Pick Out Patterns in the Night Sky

There are hundreds of billions of stars in our galaxy, though only about 5,000 are visible to the naked eye. Under ideal conditions and far from city lights, you can see about half of them on any given night. Cultures the world over see similar shapes in the night sky--the Big Dipper, Orion, and the Pleiades are just a few. New research, as discussed by Charles Kemp and published in the journal Psychological Science, reveals that our visual processing system may explain the striking commonality of constellations across cultures. Read the transcript here.  Image credit: Milky Way from the Atacama Desert by Derek Demeter