Courtesy of NASA/JPL-Caltech

Constellations are simple patterns in the sky that allow us to identify the eighty-eight divisions of the sky. The names of the constellations are Latin, but they originated from the Greek and Arabic civilizations thousands of years ago. The names of the stars are usually Arabic, but they are identified another way, using the Greek alphabet which identifies the brightness of a star within the constellation.

Constellations have also been named by ancient cultures and have been organized into a system called the zodiac. With twelve divisions, the zodiac is based on the sun's apparent movement across the ecliptic. The constellations and the zodiac signs, however, do not always line up in the zodiac because of the variances in time that has occurred over thousands of years due to the Earth's precession.