Take a gander at the constellation Gemini, also known as the Twins, soon because in about a month what’s left of the winter constellations will be gone from the evening skies. This is all part of the annual dance of all constellations as they shift to the west as Earth rounds the sun every 365 plus days.
The winter constellations leave western skies as the summer constellations come up in the east. The constellation stage is always in flux.
Even though they’re nearing the end of their western tour, the Gemini twins are easy to spot standing upright close to the western horizon just after evening twilight.
As you can see on the diagram, just look for two bright stars close together in the moderately low western sky. There are no other stars of equal brilliance that close to each other anywhere in the night sky in the northern hemisphere. The bright star to the right is Castor and the brighter, shinier one on the left is Pollux. The two stars mark the heads of the twins Castor and Pollux. Just look for a semi-straight line of stars below each star that outlines the rest of Castor and Pollux’s bodies. They resemble stickmen and have a quite a mythological tale to weave.
Pollux is one huge star, certainly not the largest in the heavens over Western Washington, but it’s a biggie. Pollux is a puffed-up version of our sun. It’s believed to be younger than our closest star. Pollux is two times as massive as our sun but eight times the diameter, almost seven million miles in girth.
It produces more than 30 times the light of the sun, but Pollux is quite a bit farther, more than 35 light years away, with one year equaling nearly six trillion miles. Because of its distance from Earth, the light we see from Pollux tonight left that star in 1974.
More than half the stars you see as single stars with your naked eyes are actually multiple star systems, some with more than three or four members. That’s certainly the case when you look at Castor. It’s actually three pairs of double stars. The individual stars in each pair orbit each other and all three pairs of stars orbit each other. Can you imagine living on a planet that orbits one of these stars? You would have six sunrises and six sunsets each day. The sextuplet star system is about 50 light years away.
In most every culture the mythological story of the constellation Gemini and the stars Castor and Pollux involve a pair of individuals linked together in some way. The story I know and love is the Greek and Roman tale in which Castor and Pollux are part of a set of quadruplets, two boys and two girls. They have the same mother Leda, the queen of Sparta, but two different fathers: Zeus, the king of the gods of Mount Olympus, and Leda’s husband, King Tyndareus.
Pollux and Helen had Zeus as their father. Helen later in life became the famous Helen of Troy. Meanwhile, Tyndareus was the daddy to Castor and Clytemnestra. Clytemnestra became the wife of Agamemnon, the commander of the Greek forces of the Trojan war.
Anyway, Castor and Pollux were half brothers but the best of buddies. Castor became an accomplished horseman while Pollux was an accomplished boxer. They were commissioned by Zeus to join Jason and the Argonauts for the search and capture of the Golden Fleece. It was on that voyage that Castor was killed in battle and descended into the underworld. Pollux was inconsolable and longed to join his brother in the underworld someday. That could never happen since Pollux was the son of Zeus, so he was half-god and half-mortal. Castor, however, son of Tyndareus, was a mortal.
Pollux begged Zeus to make a special arrangement, so the king of gods allowed Pollux to spend half of every day with his bro in the underworld and the other half of the day in this world.
Shortly after that compromise was struck Poseidon, the god of sea, gave Castor and Pollux power over controlling the winds and waves, which made them the patron of sailors at the time.
Mike Lynch is an amateur 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 at www.everettastro.org/.
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