Question

What were the patterns that people saw in the sky long ago?

Answer 1

There are many patterns:

1) Constellations, that is something like "Patterns" of stars, and people used to give them some bigger meaning than that (as they used to do with almost everything)

2) Time patterns: These are maybe the most useful, an example of this can be that in winter the time that the moon is in the sky is smaller than in the summer, so they already have some information about astronomy, other examples are things like comets and such, that also happened (and keep happening) in periodic time lapses.

Answer 2

Long time ago, people saw the constellations as patterns in the sky.  They names these patterns and tell stories about them. What people saw laong time ago are just mere patterns which forms animals and shapes.  We got the names of our constellations from the Greeks who named the constellations after the mythological heroes and mythological legends.