The sky above us – January edition
There is no night sky more beautiful than that of January, when it is clear, black as coal, and a million-crystal clear and brilliant stars twinkle across it.
Down below, the ground of the glade where you are standing is white with snow, and your breath turns into steam.
And Orion spreads out in the sky. Three stars are twinkling in his belt and below, towards the horizon, they point to Sirius, the brightest star in the earth’s sky.
That star shaped the history of mankind.
It served the ancient Egyptians to measure the length of the year and to create a good calendar. Later, much later, it served astrophysicists to better interpret star systems.
There is also a mystery attached to it, strange and unusual.
The Dogon people from the state of Mali have always known that Sirius is a double star, that in addition to the big one, there is also a smaller one. It is so small that it cannot be seen with the naked eye. However, the Dogon people know about it from the time before the telescope.
How? Nobody knows that.
And below Orion’s belt is a gigantic cloud of dust and gas, full of hydrogen, which is excellent material for making stars and planets.
You can see that cloud, otherwise known as the Orion Nebula, with the naked eye – if you know where to look for it, since it is, seen from a distance, quite small and can only be seen as a small star, so it is easily lost in the sea of others star.
But now we see that cloud as it looked like 1350 years ago since it is so many light years away from us.
At the same time, the Arabs conquered North Africa and spread the knowledge of the ancient Greeks.
But what is hidden in that gigantic cloud? It has hundreds of stars in various stages of development. Some of the youngest are barely 300 thousand years old, which is very little, and there are many younger ones.
In addition to those stars, there are also several protoplanetary disks. Planets will soon be formed from them.
Who knows, maybe someone from there will trace their sky with a telescope and wonder if there is life here.
And above the Orion Nebula, near the star Alitak in the Belt, there is an unusual-looking Nebula. It is called Horsehead because it looks like a horse’s head, and astronomers like to give unusual names to celestial objects.
It is dark and we only see it in the backlight because there are bright stars behind it. And we see it only in photos that are the result of long exposure. It is over 1300 light years away from us.
Whenever the Horse’s Head Nebula is mentioned, it is an order, and almost an obligation, to say that it was discovered by Williama Fleming, who, before becoming an astronomer, was a maid for the learned Professor Edward Pickering, director of the Harvard Observatory. Williamina was such a meticulous and generally capable woman in everything that Pickering transferred her to work at the observatory…
In general, she discovered 59 nebulae, over 300 variable stars, devised a system of star designations, etc. Along the way, she also discovered the Horse’s Head in 1888.
To the right of Orion, you will see the Pleiades, a scattered star cluster, a celestial jewel of indescribable beauty. The Pleiades are beautiful to see with the naked eye, but it’s better if you look at them through binoculars.
That is, not through a telescope, because a telescope has a narrow field of view, so you don’t see the whole flock in its total beauty.
Hurry up with the Pleiades because they are slowly moving to the daylight side of our planet.
For one winter night, this much is enough to see, and even more than that, because fatigue and low temperature make a person tired, so it is pleasant to return to a warm room for at least half an hour and sip a glass of mulled wine.
And then out again for another observing adventure of the beautiful sky above us!
