All places on Earth are, to high precision, the same distance from any star. This is why the star patterns in a given constellation do not change as we go from, say, Soviet Central Asia to the American Midwest. Astronomically, the U.S.S.R. and the United States are the same place. The stars in any constellation are all so far away that we cannot recognize them as a three-dimensional configuration as long as we are tied to Earth.
