“There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”

I just took out the garbage, not normally a time for high contemplation.

And yet if I must pick one thing about winter that I enjoy, it’s the crisp clear nights — and even in the midst of a semi-urban environment, there’s enough darkness in my neighbourhood that the stars shine brightly above me.

So despite the chill downright cold, I took a few extra moments between hauling full personal dumpsters through the snow and to the curb and looked up, up, up.

No, I didn’t see any shooting stars (though, it’s always a treat when you do see one, unexpectedly). I did manage to pick out a few half-constellations (the light pollution makes it kind of difficult).

But I got the important part — a sense of my own insignificance next to the immensity of the universe.

Constellations, by the way, have always intrigued me. First of all, even during the darkest of rural nights, I’ve never been able to “see” the shapes that they’re supposed to fit. It’s artistic license taken to a colossal extreme.

And secondly, it strikes me as a remnant, a holdover from the geocentric view of the universe. I can understand naming stars and planets — even just from a point of view of differentiating them. But assigning stars to groupings based on where we are in a three-dimensional universe seems anachronistically arrogant. That’s like saying the trees you see from your house look like a castle. Sure, maybe, but cross the street, and parallax has changed your point of view. Some of the stars that are in constellations together are so far apart — and so far away from Earth — that some of them have probably already burned out.

But that’s just unromantic of me. I love the spectacle of the stars. I even appreciate the mythology behind the constellations. So try this on for size:

15 Constellations That Are Now Extinct — including:

Felis — the cat

A small constellation between Hydra (the water snake) and Antlia (the pump). The constellation was created by Lalande in 1799 who said: “I am very fond of cats. I will let this figure scratch on the chart. The starry sky has worried me quite enough in my life, so that now I can have my joke with it.”

There’s a little bit more about Felis here. Or read all about 14 other no-longer-used constellations as linked above.

Then go out and look at the sky. Make up your own constellations, if you like. The only meanings they have are the ones we give to them. That’s probably enough.