While the boys of summer have taken the baseball fields, the boys of winter are beginning their long goodbye in the western evening sky.
I’m referring to Gemini the Twins, one of the brighter constellations that’s been lighting up the winter heavens since December. Because of Earth’s orbit around the sun, though, we’re turning away from that direction of space where the stars of Gemini are positioned.
When it’s finally dark enough this time of year, around 9:30 p.m., look in the high southwestern skies for two moderately bright stars right next to each other. These are Gemini’s brighter stars, Castor and Pollux. To help you locate them this spring you can use the very bright planet Jupiter that’s also residing in the high southwest. Castor and Pollux are the next brightest stars that you can see just to the right of Jupiter.
Castor and Pollux are also the names of the two twins that make up Gemini, marking the heads of the twins. When it’s dark enough you’ll see two slightly crooked lines of fainter stars below both Castor and Pollux that make up the rest of their bodies. Gemini is one of the 65-plus constellations we see from Snohomish County. It’s also one of the few constellations that sort of looks like what it’s supposed to be. If your skies aren’t too lit up with heavy light pollution, Gemini looks like a pair of celestial stickmen.
The star Castor is one of the most interesting stars on the celestial stage. It looks like one star to the naked eye, but with modern telescopes astronomers have resolved that Castor is actually a collection of six stars dancing around each other in a complex orbital pattern. If you live on a planet in that system, you would have six sunrises and six sunsets every day. Pollux is a single giant star, more than 10 times the diameter of our sun and a heck of a lot farther away at 34 light years, with just one light year equaling almost six trillion miles.
With even a small telescope or a halfway decent pair of binoculars you should easily see Messier Object 35, otherwise known as M35. It’s a fairly bright open cluster of young stars huddled together nearly 3000 light years away. They occupy approximately the same area in the sky as a full moon, which helps make it fairly easy to locate. There’s no way you’ll see all of the stars with your telescope, but there are believed to be up to 10,000 stars that are about 160 million years old. Believe it or not that makes them stellar toddlers.
Mike Lynch is an amateur astronomer and professional broadcast meteorologist for WCCO Radio in Minneapolis and is author of the book, “Stars, a Month by Month Tour of the Constellations” published by Adventure Publications available at bookstores at http://www.adventurepublications.net
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