Perhaps you could memorize all the constellations and potentially see if they could serve as double duty?

I've found The Stars: A New Way to See Them by H.A Rey (yes, the creator of Curious George) to be a comprehensive list with a tremendous number of pictures, charts, useful stories, mythology, etc. for memorizing all the major constellations and many of the common star names and related data. It's ostensibly aimed at a novice audience, but one might also think he was targeting the mnemonists among us as well.

Should it help in your researching image formation, the phenomenon you mentioned is called pareidolia.