Eyes Full Of Stars

Leaping across the sky as March gives way to April, we find the constellation Lepus, the hare. Like the animal it represents, Lepus lies still and inconspicuous below Orion’s feet poised to escape if detected by the hunter’s dogs Canis Major and Canis Minor. Lepus hosts a couple of interesting deep sky objects – the globular cluster M79 and Hind’s Crimson Star.

This week, we take another look at the brightest star in the night sky, the Dog Star, Sirius. During the winter months, it commands our attention with a kaleidoscopic display of dazzling color. Found nearly due south at twilight, Sirius is progressing slowly toward the western horizon. By mid-May, Sirius will set with the Sun and be absent from the night sky until it returns in autumn.

As stars go, Sirius is relatively close at 8.6 light years distant. To get a better sense of just how far away that is, consider this; many of the third graders enrolled in schools around town were born the same year the starlight we see tonight left Sirius.

This time we explore a constellation as elusive as the creature it represents, Monoceros – the Unicorn. Located east of Orion and in between the two dogs, Canis Major and Canis Minor, Monoceros is a collection of faint stars lying along the plane of the Milky Way. With a name derived from the Greek monokeros meaning unicorn, it is one of a few star patterns in the northern hemisphere with a modern history

European cartographers first added the mythical beast to other established constellations in the early 17th Century. Dutch mapmaker, Petrus Plancius, included it on his celestial globe published around 1613. Jakob Bartsch, a German astronomer, used the Latin name, Unicornus and added it to his star charts in 1624.

Mars reached opposition to Earth on January 29th, but another solar system object has been gradually making its way into the evening sky, Saturn. In addition to a beautiful ring system, Saturn holds another distinction, it is the most remote member of the solar system easily visible to the unaided eye. Currently located at a distance of about 830 million miles in the direction of the constellation Virgo, Saturn presents a nearly edge-on view of its ring system to earthbound observers.