Now that we’re well into spring you can easily see the Big Dipper at the start of evening, suspended upside down, high above the northern horizon. In fact it’s nearly overhead. If you’re facing north it looks like the Big Dipper is pouring its celestial magic onto to our part of the Earth. According to old time lore, the overturned Dipper is one of the reasons we get so much rain this time of year — although this has been a dry May so far.
At my stargazing programs and parties, I always ask the folks how many constellations they can find in the sky. Most of them can point out two or three, but just about everyone can locate is the Big Dipper. Actually, the Big Dipper is not a constellation. It’s what astronomers refer to as an asterism, which is defined as an easily recognized pattern of stars in the sky, but is not one of the “official” 88 constellations that can be seen from Earth as agreed on internationally back in 1930.
The Big Dipper actually makes up the rear and the tail of the constellation Ursa Major, otherwise known as the Big Bear. The four stars that outline the pot section of the Big Dipper also outline the bear’s derriere. The three stars of the handle outline the bear’s stretched-out tail. How it got stretched out is a story for another day. The rest of the stars (see diagram) that make up the head and legs of the Big Bear aren’t nearly as bright, but can be spotted fairly easily this time of year, even in areas of moderate light pollution.
No one knows for sure how the Big Dipper got its name in America, but there’s reason to believe that African-American slaves had a lot to do with it. They drank from dippers made from hollowed gourds. The slaves pictured a bright giant gourd in the northern stars and referred to it as “The Drinking Gourd.” They associated it with freedom because it’s always in the northern sky, in the direction of where they could experience freedom. Slaves that managed to escape followed that drinking gourd northward to a new life. Eventually the gourd evolved to the present day moniker, The Big Dipper.
Constellations or asterisms in the night sky are mainly just an accidental scattering of stars that appear in the same general direction of space. Physically, the stars have nothing to do with each other. One big exception is the Big Dipper. Five of the seven stars in that constellation are believed to have formed together in the same nebulae, beginning their stellar life about 200 million years ago as a small cluster that’s been breaking apart ever since.
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