The main difference between most stars and our Sun is simply that they are much further away. To get an idea of how far they are, remember that our Sun is 150 million kilometres away and is still too bright to look at directly, yet the stars, some of which are much brighter than the Sun, appear only as faint points of light. This picture shows a very well known group of stars for people in the Southern hemisphere - the Southern Cross . In Melbourne it is visible all year. Astronomers call groups of stars like this constellations .
Constellations are like suburbs in the sky.
They are an easy way to locate objects such as stars, planets and comets in the night sky. The sky is divided into 88 constellations. The only connection between stars in a particular constellation is that they are in the same part of the sky. The stars of the Southern Cross are all at different distances, but to us on Earth they look like a cross. Next to the Cross are two bright stars, commonly called the Pointers .