Last week in Starwatch I tried to turn the constellation Taurus the Bull into a Christmas constellation, but failed rather miserably in my estimation and most likely yours as well. I tried to tie Rudolph the red nosed reindeer to Taurus the red-eyed bull, and except for the common color on a body part it just fell apart. It was like bad Christmas fruitcake that keeps getting re-gifted. The stories are not even close to being related. Rudolph ended up being a hero who guides Santa’s sleigh through a very foggy night. Taurus is a story about Zeus, the king of the Greek gods, who tricks a princess into marrying him but winds up being locked out of his house and into divorce court. Hardly a tale that will make you sing fa la la la la.
While there really aren’t any Christmas constellations in the Everett celestial dome this time of year, or any other time for that matter, there are two signs of this most wonderful time of the year among the stars that I would like to share with you. One is small and challenging to find, and the other is large and very easy to spot.
There is a small and fairly dim star cluster in the eastern evening sky, astronomically referred to as New General Catalog Object 2264, or NGC 2264 for short, the Cone Nebula. But it also has the nickname, “the Christmas Tree Cluster” because that’s what it really looks like through a small telescope or even a decent pair of binoculars! You will have stay up a bit and do some stargazing digging to find it, but it’s worth spending the time braving the cold to get it into view.
After 8:30 or so it will be high enough above the eastern horizon to start your search. The Christmas Tree Cluster is resides in a very obscure constellation called Monoceros the Unicorn that to me looks like a ham radio tower my Dad set up on top of the house I grew up in. Forget about trying to truly see this constellation. No matter what you see it as, it’s just so very faint and undefined. The best way to find it is to use the bright constellation Orion the Hunter, perched diagonally in the southeastern sky. I know you’ve seen it before. It’s the dominant constellation of winter, containing the three bright stars in a nearly perfect row that make up the belt of the mighty hunter.
On the upper left corner of Orion is a bright reddish tinged star called Betelgeuse that marks the armpit of the hunter. On the upper right corner of Orion is the star Bellatrix, not quite as bright as Betelgeuse. Draw a line from Bellatrix to Betelgeuse and continue that line to the lower left about 10 degrees from Betelgeuse. Ten degrees is about the width of your fist at arm’s length. Scan that area with your binoculars or telescope and you should eventually find it. This coming week is a great week to find it because there isn’t much moonlight in the sky to wash out your view.
Once you find the cluster you’ll see that the 20 or so stars are arranged in the shape of a Christmas tree, and it even has a couple of brighter stars that mark the top of the tree. The brightest star resides on the base of the trunk. Just like a lot of trees at the Christmas tree lot it’s not exactly perfect, but hopefully it will still add to your holiday spirit. The starry little tree will appear to point to the lower right in binoculars and some telescopes However, most telescopes will give you an inverted view so the miniature cosmic tree will point to the upper left.
The Christmas tree shape of the cluster is arguably a pleasant coincidence. The stars just happen to be arranged that way from our view of them on Earth. Like most open clusters this is a group of young stars that formed out of a large nebula of hydrogen gas, much like our sun did over five billion years ago. These clusters of young stars hang out together for several hundred million years until gravity from other surrounding stars break the clusters up.
The stars that light up the Christmas Tree Cluster send their tidings of great joy from a long, long ways away! They’re about 2600 light years distant, with just one light year equalling nearly six trillion miles! Since a light year is defined as the distance that light travels in one year, the lights from we see from this Christmas tree tonight left those stars in about 600 B.C., 600 years before the birth of Christ. They’ve been waiting a long time for you see them!
For the Christian world there’s also a really easy sign of Christmas that shines brightly in the early evening western sky. It’s the Northern Cross, and even in areas of moderately bright city lights you should have no trouble finding it. The Northern Cross is actually part of a larger constellation called Cygnus the Swan, but it’s the brightest part of the constellation. Around 7 to 8pm look in the western sky for Deneb, the second brightest star you can see. It will be about 30 to 40 degrees above the western horizon, or between about three to four widths of your fist held at arm’s length. Below Deneb, a star around 1500 light years away, you’ll see three fairly bright stars in a horizontal row that make up the arms of the cross. Below those three stars and closer to the horizon is Albireo, a dimmer star that marks the base of the Northern Cross.
This is the only time of year that we see the Northern Cross standing nearly upright in the early evening.
Merry Christmas.
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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