Imagine the Earth inside a bubble. The bubble is divided into a grid. You look up to the bubble and you see a star and you need to locate that position. The bubble is actually what we see of the Universe as we look outward. A person in Australia will see a different part of the Universe than someone in the United States. So how can you locate a star or galaxy so you can look at it again?

A system of declination and right ascension can help us locate the position of a star, galaxy, or other object in the sky. In the northern hemisphere, the North Star does not appear to move as much as the other stars, so this is referred to as the North Celestial Pole. From there they developed a system similar to our longitude and latitude to find a location on Earth.