A disgraced crow, a grand lady, and really far-out places. You can see all of these in the low southwestern Everett sky right now.
The easiest one to see is the small but distinct constellation Corvis the Crow. Forget about it looking anything like a crow but rather a lopsided trapezoid or diamond of moderately bright stars hanging a little above the southwest horizon. Despite its lack of visual wow power it’s still one of my favorite constellations.
Crows are actually very intelligent birds but they’re certainly not the prettiest and their song can be outright irritating. According to Greek mythology though that wasn’t always the case. Crows were white with gold lining on their wings and the most melodic song. They were also so intelligent that they served as reliable messengers for the gods. Email was still a few years off. Corvis the crow though ruined all that.
Corvis acted as a messenger for Apollo, the god of the sun who was a tough taskmaster and had a quite a temper. One day Apollo sent Corvis a mission to fetch water from a magical. Allegedly this water smoothed wrinkles in skin and helped you from going bald, among other things. Anyway as soon as Corvis set out he lost his directions. He searched in vain for hours but had no luck. Like most males he was too stubborn to ask for directions but finally he flew into a bar and got pointed in the right direction. The problem was that he couldn’t resist having multiple beers and paid the price. He was so inebriated that there was no way he could find that magic fountain and flew back to Apollo with an empty chalice. Apollo then flew off the handle and put a curse not only on Corvus but all crows, scorching their white feathers to the jet black turning their beautiful song voices into the caw we hear today.
Just above the beleaguered crow in the southwestern sky is the sprawling but faint constellation Virgo the Virgin. It’s one of the largest constellations in the sky but it’s also one of the faintest. It’s not an easy constellation for beginners, especially if you have any light pollution issues.
The only really star in Virgo is Spica, a blue giant star about 263 light-years, or about 1519 trillion miles away from Earth. It’s ten times as massive and over five times larger than our sun with a girth of almost five million miles. Spica is a lot hotter than our sun with a surface temperature well over 30,000 degrees F. Spica is also moving away from us at a speed of 2200 miles an hour. Despite its tremendous fleeing speed it will still adorn our spring and summer heavens for many evenings to come.
In many ancient cultures, including the, Virgo is seen as the goddess of fertility, agriculturally speaking. She holds in her hand a shaft of wheat. A long time ago farmers looked for the first took the of Spica, Virgo’s brightest star as a cue to start their spring planting. When she leaves the evening sky in late summer, the growing season is nearly over. According to some mythology at that time Virgo leaves the land of the living and starts her annual search in the underworld for slain husband Tammuz. At last report she hasn’t found him yet but after every growing season she resumes her search. The grand lady of the night sky is truly a loyal lover.
On the northwest side of Virgo, to the upper right of Spica, there’s huge cluster of possibly up to 2000 galaxies, many of which much larger than our home Milky Way Galaxy. If you have a larger telescope, and you’re really out in the boonies, you have a chance of seeing at least a few of these many galaxies that are around 60 million light years from Earth.. Since Virgo is such a faint constellation it’s easier to use the star Spica as a bearing. The Virgo cluster will be twenty degrees or about two fist-widths at arm’s length to the upper right of Spica. You might be less than overwhelmed if you do see any of the galaxies. At best they will mainly be fuzzy patches, but those fuzzy patches are made up of whole islands of stars, each one of them with billions and billions of stars. By the way, if you flew to the Virgo cluster of galaxies in a jet airliner that flew at an average speed of 500 miles per hour, it would only take you 70,000 trillion years to get there. Hope there’s good movies on that flight.
Mike Lynch is an amateur astronomer and professional broadcast meteorologist.
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