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Constellations are sections of the sky made up of a group of stars (celestial bodies that emit their own light) and the area that surrounds them. The groups are totally arbitrary because they are sometimes made up of stars that lie huge distances from one another. To find out about the origin of constellations, we have to go back to ancient times.

In Antiquity, the men of science realised that certain groups of stars formed patterns and associated these patterns with animals, objects, and mythological figures, etc. Towards the 2nd century AD, more than half of those that we recognise today had been described: the astronomer, geographer and mathematician Claudius Ptolemy described 48 in his 'Almagest'.

But, of course, the constellations recorded by Ptolemy only include those that were visible from the northern hemisphere. The world had to wait until Modernity, with its geographic discoveries and explorations to the southern hemisphere to complete the map of the sky.

In 1930, the International Astronomical Union (IAU) divided the celestial sphere into 88 constellations, fixing precise boundaries for each one.