Historically, stars have been important to civilizations throughout the world.

They have been

part of religious practices and used for celestial navigation and orientation. Many ancient
astronomers believed that stars were permanently affixed to a heavenly sphere, and that they
were immutable. By convention, astronomers grouped stars into constellations and used them
to track the motions of the planets and the inferred position of the Sun.
It helps tell us how we got all the other elements that make up
things around us (and in us!). By the way, since your bodies are made of
elements like carbon, oxygen, etc., that means that you are made up of
atoms that used to be part of a star!
Another reason to study stars is that what we learn from other stars may
help us understand our own Sun, which is also a star. The Sun only seems
different to us because it is so much closer to us than other stars.
Understanding our own Sun is important since it is ultimately the source of
most of the energy we use on earth. It is what keeps the Earth warm
enough for us to live on and it provides the light needed for plants and
animals to stay healthy.
When we study stars, we also learn something about how they are born
and die. This helps us understand how our own solar system was formed.
We now think that our solar system was formed about 4.55 billion years
ago and that it was created from a big interstellar cloud of gas, dust, and ice
that slowly collapsed into the shape of a disk. The materials in this disk
then clumped together to form the Sun and planets. Disks like the one we
think formed our Solar System have now been detected around other stars
in our galaxy.
Understanding stars is also important because stars contain a large
fraction of all the visible mass in galaxies. As a result, their combined
gravitational forces affect the 'dynamics' of galaxies, i.e. the ways in which
galaxies move and evolve in shape. Our own galaxy is shaped like a disk
with a central 'bulge.'. Since our Solar System is in the disk, the galaxy
looks like a stripe of stars to us. We call the stripe the "Milky Way." You
can easily see the Milky Way at night if the sky is dark where you live.
The gravitational pull of one particular star, our Sun, is especially important
since it is the Sun's gravitational attraction that keeps the Earth in orbit.
Without the Sun's gravity, the Earth would fly off into space and freeze!

The motion of the Sun against the background stars (and the horizon) was used to
create calendars, which could be used to regulate agricultural practices.
The Gregorian calendar, currently used nearly everywhere in the world, is a solar
calendar based on the angle of the Earth's rotational axis relative to its local star, the Sun.
The first star catalogue in Greek astronomy was created by Aristillus in approximately 300
BC, with the help of Timocharis. The star catalog of Hipparchus (2nd century BC) included
1020 stars and was used to assemble Ptolemy's star catalogue. Hipparchus is known for the
discovery of the first recorded nova (new star). Many of the constellations and star names in
use today derive from Greek astronomy.
Medieval Islamic astronomers gave Arabic names to many stars that are still used today, and
they invented numerous astronomical instruments that could compute the positions of the
stars. They built the first large observatory research institutes, mainly for the purpose of
producing Zij star catalogues. Among these, the Book of Fixed Stars (964) was written by
the Persian astronomer Abd al-Rahman al-Sufi, who observed a number of stars, star
clusters (including the Omicron Velorum and Brocchi's Clusters) and galaxies (including
theAndromeda Galaxy). According to A. Zahoor, in the 11th century, the
Persian polymath scholar Abu Rayhan Biruni described the Milky Way galaxy as a multitude
of fragments having the properties of nebulous stars, and also gave the latitudes of various
stars during a lunar eclipse in 1019.