A beehive of stars surrounds Mars

Published 4:47 pm Tuesday, March 23, 2010

The planet Mars has been our celestial guest in the Northwest night sky all winter, and now that we’re into spring it’s starting out the evening nearly straight overhead.

As soon as it’s dark enough (later now because of daylight saving time), crank your cranium to the zenith and look for the brightest starlike object you can see.

Even with the naked eye Mars sports a copperish red hue. It’s very bright in the early spring skies, but it’ll wane in brightness as Earth and Mars drift farther apart as both planets continue their independent circuits around the sun.

If you don’t have high expectations Mars can be a moderately interesting through a telescope, but certainly not as intriguing as Jupiter and Saturn. But even with smaller telescopes you can resolve the disk of the small planet, and you may see some fuzzy dark markings. Those are Mars’ extensive valley and canyon systems.

Mars is hanging close to what many call the star cluster of spring: the Beehive cluster. Through a small telescope, binoculars or with the naked eye if the sky is dark enough, the cluster of spring resembles a hoard of bees buzzing their heavy hive.

For the next several weeks you can use Mars to find the beehive. If you roughly face the southeast the Beehive cluster will be hanging about five degrees below Mars, about half the width of your clenched fist held at arm’s length.

The Beehive cluster is in the very faint constellation Cancer the Crab. Don’t bother trying to find this constellation though. It’s one of the faintest. The Beehive cluster is actually brighter than most of the stars in the constellation.

One of the first to officially document the Beehive cluster was Greek astronomer Hipparchus, who observed it about 130 B.C. He registered it in his star catalog as a “cloudy star.” The Romans saw it as a manger and called it Praesepe, which is Latin for manger.

Back then the Beehive’s host constellation, Cancer, was known to some cultures, including many Greeks, as a pair of donkeys. The tale was that the manger star cloud was where the beasts were feeding.

The donkeys and the manger were also a way to forecast the weather. It was said that “a murky manger” was a sign of rain. Meteorologically this makes some sense because as weather systems move in, high level moisture is often the first thing that’s observed.

It wasn’t until the early 1600s when Galileo poked his telescope toward Praesepe and saw it as a cluster of stars that it eventually got the name Beehive cluster. With your not-so-crude telescope, or even a decent pair of binoculars, you can easily see how it got that moniker.

Astronomically the Beehive is considered an open star cluster, a group of young stars that emerged out of the same nebula. The stars in this cluster are believed by astronomers to be about 500 to 600 million years old, and while that’s considered a young age for a star, is rather old for a cluster of young stars. Gravity usually breaks up many of these same kind of clusters before the stars are that old, but the Beehive is hanging in there.

The mostly “teenage mob” of at least 1,000 stars is more than 3,400 trillion miles from Earth and at least 225 trillion miles wide.

The planet Saturn is on the rise this spring and is almost at its closest to Earth. We’re coming into a wonderful time for viewing Saturn with just about any size telescope. That’ll be my focus next week.

Mike Lynch is an astronomer and professional broadcast meteorologist for WCCO Radio in Minneapolis and is author of the book, “Washington Starwatch,” available at bookstores and at his Web site www.lynchandthestars.com.

The Everett Astronomical Society welcomes new members. Go to www.everettastro.org/.