Last Updated: 11 September 2026

As ancient cultures looked to the skies, they filled them with their own mythologies. Ptolemy’s Almagest identified 48 constellations, but over the next two millennia, several dozen others were added to fill the sky, for different reasons. This talk looks at the changes in the map of skies as new constellations were added, which didn’t “catch on”, and how the “official” list of 88 modern constellations came about.