Fragments

People have been making maps of the stars for at least a few thousand years, probably much longer. (Some German guy thinks that a mammoth tusk from 30,000-or-so BC is carved with a picture of the constellation Orion). Star charts have been around, in other words, since long before anyone knew where, exactly, the stars were-or what they were. Representations of the night sky are based on fragmentary, earth-bound knowledge. They were and are always partial: incomplete, and also biased. Humans have their own priorities-navigation and all that. The actual distances between those little points of light matter less than the arbitrary pictures invented to make sense of them.