This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
Shared Sky gathers two objects the atlas holds once in their own right precisely because no single tradition owns them: they recur across the sky readings of unrelated peoples who never contacted each other, each culture giving the same feature a different name and a different story.
The Pleiades is the most widely named object in the night sky, a compact cluster of young blue stars in the shoulder of Taurus. Nearly every tradition that watched the heavens named it separately: the Seven Sisters of Greece, Krittika in India, Al-Thurayya in Arabia, Subaru in Japan, Matariki across Polynesia. Its dawn risings and settings marked planting, sailing and new year seasons on every inhabited continent, and the atlas holds several of those individual registers as entries of their own; this entry is the cluster itself, the object the others share.
The Milky Way is the home galaxy seen edge on, crossing the whole sky, and traditions differ sharply on what the band is: a river of silver in China, a road of spilled milk in Greece and Rome, a street in medieval England, the river Mayu of the Andes whose dark patches are read as living animals, and a path walked by the souls of the dead in eastern North America. It is also the canvas the dark cloud constellations of the southern sky are drawn on, figures read in shadow rather than in stars, which is where this grouping's own edges run into others in the atlas.