Gazing at the springtime stars
Spring is here, officially, equinoxially on March 20 at 5:37 a.m. EDT.
We need that to happen every year. But this year, after a cabin-fever winter — consequential snow, prison-bar icicles and COVID-19 — we maybe need it deeply. We need to get out.
But it will be warmer. Escape by walking out the kitchen door at night and look at the stars in relative comfort, rather than being frost-bit.
“I think spring and fall are the best times of the year,” said Bill Cloutier of New Milford, one of the leaders of the John J. McCarthy
Observatory in New Milford. “The summer is warmer, but it gets dark so late.”
The spring sky is lovely. If the grand winter constellation of Orion, the Hunter, is sinking, there are lions and dippers and herdsmen rising.
Leo, the Lion — one of the constellations of the zodiac — has been moving into prime view for a while.
Bob King, a Duluth, Minn., a science writer and amateur astronomer whose blog is called Astro Bob, said he sees Leo like other people see first robins hopping across the melting snow.
“It really straddles winter and spring,” he said.
It’s easy to see now, high in the southern sky. Its stars form a sickle — an inverted question mark — followed by a triangle. At the base of the sickle is Regulus, a bright star 85 light years away
“Leo is up now by 8 p.m. and it stays up,” said Monty Robson, of New Milford, the director of the McCarthy Observatory.
And unlike many constellations. You can look at Leo and imagine a sitting lion, with the curve of the sickle forming a lion’s maned head and the last star of the triangle its tail.
“It’s one of the favorite constellations,” said Geoff Chester, spokesman for the U.S. Naval Observatory in Washington DC.
“Leo is fun,” said Diana Hannikainen, observing editor for Sky & Telescope Magazine. “It’s one of the few constellations that kind of looks like what it’s supposed to look like.”
Nearby, also high in the sky, is Ursa Major, the Great Bear, known to Americans as the Big Dipper. To the English, it’s the Plow. Other cultures see a wagon or a saucepan. The culinary-minded French call it La Grande Casserole.
The ancient Greeks named it the Great Bear.
The story goes: Their chief god, Zeus — who was always doing such things — impregnated the nymph
Callisto.
Zeus’ jealous wife, Hera, quick on the metamorphosing trigger, transformed Callisto into a bear. Zeus then placed the nymph into the heavens with her cubs — the stars of Ursa Minor, which includes Polaris, the North Star — to immortalize them.
The Big Dipper is a circumpolar constellation — it’s visible year round with the two stars on the outer edge of the dipper bowl always pointing to Polaris. (Escaping slaves, heading away from the American South on the Underground Railway used the Big Dipper as a guide north. Hence the folk song “Follow the Drinking Gourd.”)
In the fall and winter, the Big Dipper can wheel low toward the northern horizon. Now it’s high in the sky, easy to see, gloriously recognizable.
And if you follow the arc of its handle through the sky, it will lead you to Arcturus in the constellations Bootes, the Herdsman.
Arcturus is one of the brightest stars in the night sky — for us, second brightest only to Sirius, the Dog Star which is now sinking toward the southwest horizon.
It’s a giant red star, which means that even to the naked eye, it has an orange glow. Its name means “Guardian of the Bear” because it follows Ursa Major throughout the season.
But Bootes is one of the constellations that takes a great deal of imagination to look at and see a heavenly herdsman keeping his great flock of stars moving.
“To me, it looks like an ice cream cone,” said Chester, of the U.S. Naval Observatory
Later in the spring, in May, you can keep the arc going, following it through Arcturus to Spica, the bright white star in the zodiacal constellation Virgo, the Virgin.
“The saying is ‘Arc to Arcturus, then speed on to Spica,’ ” King said.
And know when you look, that time, like the constellations, is not standing still.
“I see Virgo and I think of summer,” King said.