‘Orion and his Gang’ rule the sky

Published 7:19 am Saturday, March 6, 2010

Without a doubt, one of the best clusters of constellations in the Northwest night sky is what I call “Orion and his Gang.”

The majestic constellation Orion is surrounded by a bevy of bright stars and constellations. It’s my favorite part of the night sky and makes winter stargazing worth bundling up for.

Surrounding the mighty hunter with his cinched belt of three bright stars in a row are the bright constellations like Taurus the Bull, with the bright Pleiades star cluster; Auriga the Chariot Driver turned goat farmer; Gemini the Twins; and Canis Major and Canis Minor, the Big and Little Dogs. The hounds of the heavens are found to the lower left of Orion.

Canis Major and Minor are not the only doggy constellations in the sky. There’s also Canes Venatici, the Hunting Dogs, but it’s a very minor constellation that is very low in the northeastern sky this time of year, just a little to the right of the Big Dipper’s handle.

Canis Major is one of those select constellations that actually resembles what it’s supposed to be. It really looks like a dog up on its hind legs, begging for food at the foot of his master Orion.

Sirius, the brightest star in the night sky, marks the cold nose of the big pooch. The next brightest star you see just to the right of Sirius is Mirzam, which denotes the elevated front paw. To the lower left of Sirius there’s a nearly perfect triangle of stars that marks Canis Major’s hind end, his back paw, and his tail.

The star Aludra at the tip of the tail is one of the more distant naked eye stars in the night sky at more than 3,200 light-years away. If you see a star like Aludra that’s so far away, common sense tells you straight away that you’re looking at one gargantuan star, and in fact most astronomers believe Aludra is more than 28 million miles in diameter. Our own sun isn’t even a million miles in diameter.

Aludra also kicks out more than 100,000 times the light of our sun.

As impressive as Aludra’s stats are, the star that really gets your attention in Canis Major is Sirius, the brightest star in the night sky. Sirius is a Greek name that translates into English as “the scorcher”.

Its brilliance is chiefly due to its close proximity to us, relatively speaking. The big shiner is only 8.6 light years away, or about 50 trillion miles away. Sirius is about twice the mass and twice the diameter of our sun.

A fun thing to do with Sirius is to look at it with a small telescope or even a pair of binoculars, especially when it’s really low in the sky and its light has to pierce through more of Earth’s atmosphere. That causes the light to scintillate violently, making it flicker with all of the colors of the rainbow, kind of like a cosmic kaleidoscope.

With a small scope or binoculars, scan the heavens about 3 degrees or about six full moon-lengths below and slightly to the right of Sirius for a small cluster of faint stars that astronomers call M41.

It’s a cluster of about 100 young stars ranging in age from 200 to 240 million years old. That’s considered young for stars. It’s about 25 light-years in diameter and about 2,300 light-years from Earth.

Compared to Canis Major, Canis Minor the Little Dog is a joke. It’s basically just a line between two stars, the relatively bright star Procyon and the somewhat dimmer Gomeisa and that’s it. It should be referred to as the little wiener dog. Canis Minor is just a little to the upper left of Sirius and Canis Major.

One of the coolest things to see in that part of the late winter sky is what’s called “the winter triangle.” It’s an absolutely perfect triangle with the bright stars Procyon, Sirius and Betelgeuse at Orion’s armpit.

According to Greek and Roman mythology Canis Major and Canis Minor are the hunting dogs of the nocturnal hermit Orion. Zeus, the king of the gods, had a hit put out on Orion because of his advances on Zeus’ daughter Artemis.

Orion and his two favorite hunting dogs were magically transformed into the stars and constellation we see all winter and into early spring.

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/.