How can you tell when a star is a part of a constellation when it's amongst thousands of tiny dots?

Is it the biggest dots that your connecting? .. I'm new at constellations and when I was looking at this picture..

http://laastro.lanl.gov/earthwatch/00/RE鈥?/a>

I couldn't tell which dots to connect because there are so many. How could you possibly tell that it's a Sagittarius?How can you tell when a star is a part of a constellation when it's amongst thousands of tiny dots?Constellations are arbitrary inventions - they are groups of stars that look related from the Earth, but these stars don't have anything to do with each other. They may be hundreds, thousands of light years apart. They just happen to be in the same direction from the Earth.



Yes, it's usually the brightest stars that make up the constellations, so the biggest dots in pictures. That picture is just part of the larger constellation of Sagittarius, so anything within the constellations boundaries is considered 'in Sagittarius'.How can you tell when a star is a part of a constellation when it's amongst thousands of tiny dots?
There is nothing official about the constellation figures; in fact, if you look at several different books, you'll see different ways of "connecting the dots." What is official is the _boundaries_ of the constellations: the borders between adjacent constellations in the sky. These were defined back in the 1920s by the International Astronomical Union. So we now have an official definition of, say, the boundary between Sagittarius and Scorpius, so it's easy to tell whether a particular star is in one constellation or another. This is no different from the way we define countries and states on the Earth. There's no question whether I'm standing in New York State or Pennsylvania.How can you tell when a star is a part of a constellation when it's amongst thousands of tiny dots?As has already been stated - the original set up of the constellations was based on the brightest stars.

We now use the place where those constellations are to define an area of the sky. So the whole celestial sphere is divided into 88 constellations, a bit like defining areas of land on earth by countries or states. Its a convenient way to map the sky. Any star within the region defined by a constellation is now considered to be in that constellation.



see: http://www.astro.wisc.edu/~dolan/constel鈥?/a>

and:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constellati鈥?/a>How can you tell when a star is a part of a constellation when it's amongst thousands of tiny dots?
constellations were cooked up by old greek(?) guys who looked up in the sky and said, hey, that looks kind of like a flying horse, or that looks like a guy pulling a bow and arrow, its kind of like when you look at clouds, not everyone sees the same thing, , being htat they're stars, and that they're so many, its obvious you wont look up and see the same things they did, i mean, even when drawn out and dot to dotted, i mean have you ever seen pagasus, doesnt even look like a flying horse! so yeah, its normal, it just takes alot of studying, to be able to see htem:)How can you tell when a star is a part of a constellation when it's amongst thousands of tiny dots?http://www.stellarium.org/

This is freeware that you can download. It is an interactive star chart. Just tell it where you are and it will tell you what you see. You can use this to answer your question here and many more in your future. Enjoy!How can you tell when a star is a part of a constellation when it's amongst thousands of tiny dots?
you cant.



this picture is very zoomed in and only shows a small portion of sagittarius. teh greeks may have seen a centaur archer guy but what ppl see nowadays is a teapot. this is obvious in larger scale pictures.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orion_(cons鈥?/a>



Hopefully this will help ya out...