So is the celestial sphere is where the stars lay to form a constellation?

The "celestial sphere" is an obsolete idea, since there are non-sun unaided eye stars ranging from just above 4 ly from Earth to about 4000 ly from Earth.



All stars are bodies just like the sun, each nearly spherical, each gravitationally bound luminous balls of plasma. They are scattered throughout the universe, but do come in interesting geometric configurations, like binary star systems, star clusters, and features of galaxies.



Construct a full three dimensional picture of the stars, and you will not get a sphere. Do that with the unaided eye stars, and you pretty much just get one spial arm of our Milky Way Galaxy.



We still do use the idea of the celestial sphere as a coordinate system for astrometry...and that is about it. All we use the set of constellations for...is identifying direction toward distant space, and keep around the right ascension and declination coordinate system for "navigating it".So is the celestial sphere is where the stars lay to form a constellation?The celestial sphere is a projection of a 3D array of stars onto an imaginary sphere which surrounds an observer, who is assumed to be on Earth. It is not a real thing.



A constellation is a series of imaginary lines drawn by artistically-inclined humans to connect unrelated stars. It is also not a real thing.So is the celestial sphere is where the stars lay to form a constellation?The "celestial sphere" is an abstraction, not a real place. It is simply a way of describing positions of objects in the sky _as if_ they were located on an imaginary sphere an infinite distance from the Earth. In reality, planets, stars, and galaxies are located at many different distances from Earth in three-dimensional space. Their distances range from a few hundred kilometres (artificial satellites) to many billions of light years (distant galaxies).So is the celestial sphere is where the stars lay to form a constellation?there is no real celestial sphere, that's an outdated concept. Stars from 5 light years away to a few thousand light years away are in constellations