Star clusters: nature's cosmic 'lumps in porridge'

Across millennia and continents, human beings have looked up at the same handful of stars and seen the same thing — sisters, not strangers. The Central West Astronomical Society in Parkes invites us to consider what this convergence means: that our impulse to find pattern and kinship in the cosmos may be among the most universal things about us. From the ancient Greeks to Aboriginal Australians to cultures across Africa, the Pleiades were named independently yet identically, a quiet testament to a shared perceptual inheritance. In the star clusters of the Milky Way, we may be reading not just