The Week in SpaceDecember 21-27, 2009
It Must Be Winter The Pleiades are synonymous with winter in the Northern Hemisphere, but their location near the celestial equator makes them easily visible from every spot on Earth except the poles. Understandably, a wealth of mythology surrounding the Pleiades springs from nearly every culture on our planet. They are mentioned in Homer’s Odyssey, referred to several times in the Bible, and described by Tennyson as glittering “like a swarm of fire-flies tangled in a silver braid.” Native Americans measured visual acuity by the number of individual stars the viewer could see in the Pleiades, and ancient Greeks saw seven sisters being pursued by Orion the Hunter. In reality, the Pleiades are a cluster of some five hundred very young stars that lie 380 light-years away in the constellation Taurus. Image credit: Davide De Martin / Skyfactory.org / Digitized Sky Survey / ESA/ESO/NASA FITS Liberator Weekly CalendarDecember 21-27, 2009Holidays - Sky Events - Space History
Winter Solstice 12:47 pm |
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