NavList:

Tony Oz, you wrote:
"the whole concept of so called "constellations" is wrong and misleading, it should be dumped"

How would we do that? I'm not kidding. How would we make the constellations go away? Push the "off" button?? :) Suppose the IAU put out a bulletin announcing that the astronomical community (that portion represented by the IAU) no longer considers the current constellations officially-sanctioned. What would happen? Would their pages then be expunged from Wikipedia? Or are you thinking of some other way of eliminating the constellations?

As long as we're at it, how is the "concept" of the constellations "misleading"? Do you mean in the sense that they suggest objects are close together physically when, in fact, they are only in the same direction? Example: when I look at the constellation Virgo, on the right day or two of a month, I can see the Moon, which is only a bit more than one light-second from Earth. With a good backyard telescope, I can see the red dwarf star Ross 128, which is only 11 light-years from Earth, on the order of 250 million times further away than the Moon, but it's still in the constellation Virgo. And with an above average backyard telescope, I can see (and I have seen) the quasar 3C 273 which is over 2.4 billion light-years from Earth, and that means it's on the order of 250 million times farther away than the star Ross 128, but still in Virgo. We say that all of these objects are "in Virgo" which to the uninitiated can sound like they're all in the same neighborhood. Is that what you're objecting to when you say the concept is misleading? It can certainly be a stumbling block for students just beginning to think about astronomy... On the other hand, I'm not sure this pedagogic issue would change much if we eliminated the constellations. 

Frank Reed