When you gaze upon the Butler night sky, especially in the dark skies of the countryside, you can allegedly see all kinds of people and creatures up there.

Right now there’s a disgraced hunter turned hero, two bears, another mighty hunter chasing the bears, a goose, a giant scorpion, a dolphin, a harp, a stretched out dragon, and a winged horse in the sky.

If you can honestly see all of them as what they’re supposed to be, you either have a great imagination or you’re a big liar.

The vast majority of constellations just don’t look like what they’re supposed to be, not even in the dark countryside. This week it will be tough to spot constellations because of the full or nearly full moon. It will be a whole lot easier next week.

To create constellations we do the same thing our distant ancestors did. We connect the stars with imaginary lines to come up with images, just like dot-to-dot puzzles in a kid’s coloring book.

Unlike the coloring book, though, the stars that make up the dots are of varying brightness, and there are no numbers by the stars. We have to decide what stars to connect with our mind’s eye.

Back then, ancient civilizations watched the stars rise in the east and set in the west in the course of a night. At the same time the stars would gradually migrate westward from night to night through the course of the year. From those motions people made clocks and calendars.

Those ancient people thought the stars, wandering stars (now known as planets), the sun, and the moon were fixed on big transparent spheres that surrounded and revolved around the Earth in complicated patterns. In many cultures the stars themselves were seen as gods or other forms of divinity. I love the old theory that stars were peepholes where you could see into heaven.

Just as people do now, our ancestors tried to make sense out of the randomness of the multitudes of stars that greeted them every night. They connected the stars the best they could to make pictures that were mainly meant to commemorate or celebrate a person, god, animal, or even an object in the sky.

Many believed these cosmic pictures were divinely designed. The pictures they came up with were based on local legends and mythology. It’s quite apparent that it didn’t really matter to them that the constellations didn’t quite match what was being portrayed; the familiar patterns were handy story-telling tools around a campfire.

With the absence of the beyond-belief media sources we have today, the constellation pictures were great for passing down local mythology and legends through the generations. That’s because the star patterns never seemed to change in size or shape.

In reality, the stars change positions relative to each other in the sky as they orbit at various speeds around the Milky Way Galaxy, but not enough to radically change constellations for thousands of years. We still see basically the same constellations in the space age as were seen in the Stone Age.

No one knows exactly when people started seeing these pictures in the sky. There are some artifacts and texts from ancient Sumeria, now present day Iraq, that go back more than 5,000 years showing that people recognized constellations. Scholars have concluded that even back then they already had a lion, a bull, and a scorpion as constellations. We see all three of these in our skies today in more or less the same form as Leo the Lion, Taurus the Bull, and Scorpius the Scorpion.

Civilizations like the Egyptians, the Chinese, Babylonians, Native Americans, and many others developed and spread their constellation lore. The funny thing is that many different cultures, separated by vast distances, have similar names or interpretations for some of the same constellations. For example, many cultures saw the Big Bear as the Big Bear. How and why this happened is still a mystery to this day.

By the time the second century rolled around the famous Greek astronomer Ptolemy had cataloged 48 constellations, some of which were borrowed from the Babylonians and others.

He published these constellations and other information in his great work, the Almagest. The Greek lore of the constellations is very colorful and many of the stories are still well known to this day.

You can easily call them the earliest of soap operas and many are not exactly family friendly. They’re based on Greek mythology involving Zeus and Hera, the king and queen of the gods, and their highly dysfunctional courtship and marriage. Other celestial soap operas involve Ares, the god of war, Poseidon, the god of the sea, and many, others.

Presently the sky is divided up into 88 constellations, some big, some small, some bright, and some dim. Astronomers have done this to refine the geography of the night sky for mapping purposes. Technically, every part of the sky is part of one of constellation or another. Constellations actually have arbitrary parallel and perpendicular boundaries. The familiar and not so familiar star pictures lie within the boundaries.

The only place you can see all 88 constellations through the course of the year is along the equator. Around here we can see about 65 to 70 constellations through the year. The constellations that never get above our horizon are due to the curvature of the Earth.

Many of the constellations we can’t see are visible from backyards in Australia and other locales in the southern hemisphere. The reverse is also true.

One of the strangest constellations we see around here is Sagittarius the Archer. According to Greek mythology Sagittarius is supposed to be a half-man, half-horse firing an arrow. Good luck seeing that. Most folks, including yours truly, see Sagittarius as a little teapot. In late October at the end of evening twilight the celestial teapot is in the very low southwestern sky tipping toward the horizon. As a bonus you can see the planet Saturn hovering above it.

Mike Lynch is an amateur astronomer and professional broadcast meteorologist for WCCO Radio in Minneapolis/St. Paul. He is also the author of “Stars: a Month by Month Tour of the Constellations,” published by Adventure Publications and available at bookstores and at adventurepublications.net. Contact Mike Lynch at mikewlynch@comcast.net.