THE SOUTHWORTH PLANETARIUM
207-780-4249      www.usm.maine.edu/planet
70 Falmouth Street     Portland, Maine 04103
43.6667° N                   70.2667° W
Founded January 1970
Julian date:  2457645.16

        "You're alive....you want to be more alive."

                        -George Bernard Shaw

THE DAILY ASTRONOMER

Tuesday, September 13, 2016

Orion in the Morning!

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Thanks to Radio Astronomy panelist  Heidi V

for suggesting the DA about the dark matter galaxy.

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4:00 a.m. is the only known conduit into the ethereal realm where most mortals dare not venture.    Poised uneasily between the midnight revels and awakening dawn, the 4:00 a.m. hour affords any intrepid -and sleep deprived- sky watcher the opportunity to truly behold the infinite above.  During the other 23 hours, the moments dissolve rapidly into each other.   During this 4 am hour, they loiter about, like motes suspended in a shaft of sunlight.     At this this time of year, during the 4 am hour, Orion rises magnificently in the east., preceded by the elegant Pleiades Star Cluster.    Tennyson described them as being "like fireflies tangled in a silver braid."   To Orion, however, they are,and have always been, a gathering of alluring young women.   Through the centuries, he has pursued them in desperate earnest, but has remained frustrated by their elusiveness.  It is said that Zeus even transformed them into swans to protect them from the lustful Orion, after he, himself, had enjoyed clandestine liaisons with them.   Despite this transfiguration, Orion persists in his infatuation.   He follows them this morning, as he has done for thousands of years.

​Orion the Hunter rising in the pre-dawn sky.      In mid September, Orion looms high in the east by the onset of twilight, heralding the return of cooler weather and longernights.   Image:  Michael Rael

Although we know today that an array of disparate stars comprise the Orion pattern, the uber-human those stars represent continues to exercise a fascination over us.    Intellectually, we understand that Orion is a mere figment that would dissipate upon approach.   Intuitively, he serves as the ancient world's emissary, connecting our modern society with those communities that first took root in the Fertile Crescent, the fog-enshrouded northern hinterlands, and in various locales around the world.     Though he has assumed various identities, Orion's structure has always been all too humanoid:    the Long Sash of the Dakotas; the primeval Nimrod, the Egyptian Osiris, God of the Dead, and myriad other characters which long lost generations of humans elevated to the highest station: the night sky.   Orion disquiets us with reminders of our mortality.    Even over a life fully lived, Orion's component stars scarcely budge.   The stars themselves do move rapidly and traverse millions upon millions of miles in an Earth century, but they are so remote, these motions are slight.  Were it not for the discerning astronomers who had to first dismantle Orion in order to discern him, we could easily believe the stars are fixed and the patterns they form eternal.

​Orion the Hunter as depicted in Johann Bayer's 

Uranometria (1603).  Here, Orion faces away from Taurus

the Bull.  Most depictions show Orion confronting the

Taurus.  

Orion is not eternal.   Over the course of tens of thousands of years, its shape will become distorted and the superhuman will all but vanish in the star field.   A few hundred thousand years from now, there'll be little left of him in the sky, as our solar system proceeds to other parts of the galaxy along its 225-million year long circuit around the Milky Way.    Orion will perish gradually, just as it formed gradually in the skies that loomed over the swarms of Earth's hunter gatherers.      

For this reason, perhaps, the 4 am hour is the best time to view Orion. As our sliver of the planet dozes just prior to turning toward our parent star, one may stand before the grand hunter when time's otherwise inexorable glow seems to abate.   The conduit into the eternal opens briefly so as to remind the simple star gazer nobody can ever truly be displaced from the cosmos.