John Levi, age 11, of Buffalo, N. Y.,

How were the constellations formed?

If you saw the stars for the first time, they would. seem to be spattered helter‑skelter across the vast dome of the sky. You would notice big ones and little ones, bright ones and dim, If you gazed night after night, you would soon come to recognize patterns and designs of stars. Four bright stars over there form a square. Over there, another group forms a letter W, another a triangle. These recognizable star groups are the constellations.

The ancient stargazers were very systematic as they studied the heavens and naturally they wanted to compare notes with each other. It is very confusing to point out a particular This star or That star among the swarming hosts, For this reason, they named the groups of stars which we call the constellations. They could then identify an individual star, say, in the constellation Orion or a definite star in the tail of Ursa the Bear and everyone would know which star was meant.

Every stargazer, ancient or modern, knows that each constellation takes its own proper place in the sky. Cassiopeia, shaped like a W, is always opposite Ursa the Bear ‑ which we call the Big Dipper. Every nighty many of the constellations follow each other in a parade over the sky. The heavenly parade changes with the seasons. Orion is a winter constellation, Scorpio decks the summer skies. Everything seems to be in perfect order.

But if we could reach, say, Polaris, the stars would be arranged in a different order, There would be none of our constellations in the sky.

This is because we would be looking at a different part of the Milky Way. Our Solar System is but a speck in a vast system of billions of stars scattered through space, some fairly near to us, most of them far, far away.

The earth spins on its axis and orbits the sun ‑ taking us around to face first one view and then another of the star‑.studded Milky Way. The constellations are merely groups of neighboring stars which just seem to form patterns.

The stars in a constellation are all in one direction, from our point of view. However, they are not all at the same distance. One or two stars in a group may be quite near, as stars go, others may be many light years farther away and a few may be in the middle distance. Our eyes do not allow for these differences in distance and a group of stars occupying the same part of the sky seem to be neighbors.

The teeming stars in the Milky Way are all swinging around like a monster wheel, Some move faster than others, but the distances between them are so vast that we cannot detect any changes in a life time. But through the ages, changes are occurring which gradually alter the shape of our constellations and in say, a billion years, most of the starry designs we see will be unrecognizable.