From the Southworth Planetarium
“I’ll nominative the genitive to date the accusatory and watch as the ablative vocalizes his first person declension.”
THE DAILY ASTRONOMER
July 20, 2010
Leo’s Heart and Orion’s Shoulders
Let’s cast our minds back to the April evening sky, in which an observer would see the magnificent Orion lurking in the west. Orion is the refrigerator with head: a rectangle forms his body. The northern two stars, Betelgeuse and Bellatrix mark his shoulders. The southern stars, Rigel and Saiph, represent knees. Trailing Orion like mindless sycophants are his hunting dogs, Canis Major and Minor. North of Canis Major -and east of Orion- is the two-line constellation representing the Gemini twins, Castor and Pollux. East of the twins is Cancer the Crab, the impossibly faint and featureless star pattern that no stable personality could ever regard as being crab-like. The crab’s only discernible feature is the beehive star cluster, a white splotch of light occupying the crab’s center. East of Cancer the Crab is Leo the Lion, a rare constellation that actually resembles its namesake character. A sickle arrangement of stars comprises his front section. This sickle resembles a mirror-image question mark. Its southern point star is Regulus, a star forming its heart. A triangle marks the Lion’s hindquarter section.
This April evening sky review should help us understand the sky as we observe it now. For, tonight, one would see Leo the Lion close to the western horizon after sunset. Such is its angle that Leo appears poised on its head, with his heart steeped in dusk twilight. Within a few hours after sunset, Leo sets. Fast forward through the night to the pre-dawn hours. In the eastern pre-dawn sky one will now just see Orion’s shoulder stars emerging as the dawn glow brightens. This time of year, Orion’s gradually re-appears just before sunrise. Throughout the next few weeks, Orion’s entire body slowly ascends into the eastern sky. Presently, however, we merely glimpse his shoulders.
We see Leo setting in the western evening sky and Orion slowly rising in the eastern pre-dawn sky because the Sun is currently passing through Gemini the Twins. By this statement we mean, of course, that Earth is on the far side of the Sun relative to the stars comprising the Gemini pattern. From our perspective, of course, it appears as though the Sun is actually progressing through the part of the sky Gemini occupies. It is “between” Orion and Leo. Therefore, tonight, we briefly see Leo after the sky darkens. Much later, we then briefly see the upper section of Orion before the Sun, in Gemini, draws too close to the eastern horizon and ruins our view.
It might seem rather strange that Leo and Orion, while close together in the sky, are visible at opposite ends of the night right now. Yet, such deceptively wide separations between proximate constellations occur when the Sun happens to travel between them. We’ll see Leo and Orion together again, in the early morning late autumn; late evening winter; or early evening spring sky.
