The stars
At the end of each day, the blue sky dominated by the sun changes to darkness, from the depths of which the stars appear, giving a sense of the infinity of the universe. Until a few hundred vears ago. however, the of humans could not grasp the idea of the inconceivably vast distances of an empty universe. In earlier times, humans saw the vault of the heavens as a fixed material dome on which the stars were hung or existed as openings. That is probably the reason why sun, moon, and stars are shown in bodily form in practically all pictorial representations, with the courses of these heavenly bodies expressed as "paths" or "ways." One has only to think of Apollo, god of the sun, passing across the vault of the heavens every day in his fiery chariot. The moon is represented in its main phases of crescent, semicircle, and disk. The waxing and waning of the moon and the annual movements of the constellations became fixed points of reference for human- kind's divisions of time.
