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Connect the stars

Tap the stars in the right order and the figure appears. Then turn them, and find out they were not close together at all.

Lines drawn: 0 of 7tap the circled stars, one after another
Ursa Major: a map of stars to connect, 0 lines drawn of 7. Choose a star with the arrow keys, confirm with Enter.

Tap the next starIf you get it wrong, nothing happens: just try again.

Why they fall apart when you turn them

The stars of a constellation look close together, but almost never are: they are only in the same direction, as seen from here. One can be eighty light-years away and the one next to it a hundred and twenty, which is forty light-years farther. As long as you stay on Earth there is no way to tell, because the sky flattens everything against us as if it were painted on a dome.

The figures are our own invention, and it is wonderful that they are: someone, thousands of years ago, looked at seven dots and saw a ladle in them. From somewhere else in the Galaxy those seven dots make nothing at all, and there would be other figures that we will never see.

Open the card: Ursa Major

Positions from the Yale Bright Star Catalogue, distances from SIMBAD (Centre de Données astronomiques de Strasbourg).