September Sights

As brilliant Jupiter sets low in the west at about midnight, ruddy Mars rises in the east. Mars gets closer, rises earlier, becomes brighter as the fall progresses and the icy nights of winter take over.

The Great Square of Pegasus, a nearly perfect, empty square of bright stars (about as bright as those of the Big Dipper,) shines in the east.

The north-west side of the Great Square points directly to the magnificent Pleiades star cluster (it will have risen by 11:00 P.M.) It appears to most observers as a cloudy spot in the sky, though keen-eyed observers have seen as seven sparkling stars, the "seven sisters." Through the simplest pair of binoculars it resolves into hundreds more. It was born over four hundred million years ago when the spiral arms of our galaxy compressed a vast cloud of interstellar gas to trigger the formation of stars.

One of those arms is overhead tonight. Cutting the sky in half is a cloudy band looking like a stream of milk This is the Milky Way. Not as spectacular to the eye as a blazing planet or a star cluster, it is our minds that tell us of its true grandeur -- it consists of stars so far away that we only see them as a group. Only by means of an optical aid -- such as a small pair of binoculars -- does the stream resolve into millions of stars.

These three - Mars, the Pleiades, the Milky Way - not to mention the magnificent dome of stars overhead - all provide us with wonders, both to the mind and to the eye, greater than anything we can see on the Earth.

(08/22/07)