Felton Davis of the Second Avenue Star Watchers shared this dispatch early this morning...
Waning crescent Moon and very close by, the Pleiades in the constellation Taurus, high over East Third Street at 4 a.m. on Wednesday.All Seven Sisters could clearly be seen, especially if you blocked the glare from the Moon, but only three of them showed up in the photos.
2 comments:
I love this. Thank you, Felton!
https://jalopnik.com/physicists-finally-have-an-answer-for-why-the-subaru-lo-1845985025
Physicists Finally Have An Answer For Why The Subaru Logo
Has Only Six Stars Instead Of Seven
Subaru’s six-star badge is sometimes said to refer to Fuji Heavy Industries as the big star, and the five smaller stars as the other five companies, so for them, the six-star thing works fine. But it doesn’t explain why, somehow, all these ancient cultures knew there was a seventh star there even though it’s not visible without very modern equipment that the people who came up with these seven-star myths would not have had.
Astronomers Ray and Barnaby Norris seem to have figured out an answer, thankfully: Careful measurements with the Gaia space telescope and others show the stars of the Pleiades are slowly moving in the sky. One star, Pleione, is now so close to the star Atlas they look like a single star to the naked eye. But if we take what we know about the movement of the stars and rewind 100,000 years, Pleione was further from Atlas and would have been easily visible to the naked eye. So 100,000 years ago, most people really would have seen seven stars in the cluster. We believe this movement of the stars can help to explain two puzzles: the similarity of Greek and Aboriginal stories about these stars, and the fact so many cultures call the cluster “seven sisters” even though we only see six stars today.
Post a Comment