THE DAILY ASTRONOMER
Tuesday, April 4, 2023
April 2023 Night Sky Calendar Part I: The Stars
Well, bah humbug and a bucket of November rain to the dyspeptic-souled sourpuss who derided April as the 'cruelest month.' While some might describe the fourth month as a malevolent entity bent on malice and hatred, some of us regard it as the most hopeful time of year. Astronomically, we are now seeing the winter star patterns descending inexorably in the west while the summer stars ascend in the east: a harbinger of both the warmth to come and the imminent departure of the winter chill.
Today we bid a fond and temporary farewell to some constellations while offering a hospitable welcome to those that are emerging into our evening sky.
ORION: descending
Animal-slaying, skirt-chasing, rabble-rousing, forest prowling, star studded behemoth striding the winter sky like a celestial colossus. On those deep winter nights when you're nestled within a hands-breadth of the hearth-flame and casting forlorn glances out the window into the dark and serene infinitude, Orion is the fellow who returns your gaze. As resplendently attired as he is well armed, Orion has loomed larger than life in Earth's skies since the murky prehistoric days. Cast yourself back 15,000 years when our pristine shores were overburdened by mile-high glaciers and you'd see essentially the same Orion following more or the less the same path he follows now except that he was prominent back then in the summer months, or what passed for summer during those perpetually frigid days. Now called a winter pattern owing to its prominence between December and April, Orion will vanish into the dusk by mid-May only to return to the pre-dawn skies of early August. We have seen and throughout our lives will continue to watch this transition each year. Return in late summer, reaching prominence in winter and disappearing in mid spring. Over and over again: a comforting constant in a world constantly in flux. This month be sure to cast a wink at the departing Orion and, as he did to the mammoths, Stonehenge architects and the long line of long since deceased emperors, he might well wink back.
LEO THE LION: getting high
Even by the lofty standards of the highly menacing and ferociously formidable Panthera leo species, Leo was certainly not a cat with which even the most intrepid would wish to trife. Impervious to sword cuts, arrow punctures and flames, this monstrous predator struck terror to the ever shrinking Nernean population. Such was the voraciousness of its appetite and the power of its immense body that Leo's den was said to have been piled ceiling high with the polished bones of his hapless and presumably tasty victims. All was going swimmingly for the well-fed Leo until the indomitable Heracles sought him out. Desperate to atone for atrocious crimes committed under the influence of one of Hera's spells, Heracles was hellbent on performing a series of labors that would have made short work of lesser men (in other words, all of us). After Heracles found Leo, however, even this mighty warrior was initially flummoxed. He spent a quiver of arrows and struck him with a sword a few dozen times before realizing that the Nemean Lion bore nary a scratch from these repeated assaults. With nothing else for it, Heracles tossed away the weapons and grappled with the lion. Heracles prevailed and after strangling the struggling demon cat, snapped off one of its claws and used it to cut away its hide, which Heracles used as a cloak for the rest of his immensely adventurous and exhausting life. Hera, incensed at Heracles' victory over Leo, hoisted the lion into the sky where it remains to this day. One can see this late winter constellation high in the southern early evening sky.
HERCULES: ascending
And speaking of the muscle-bound, lame-brained, but shrewd, volcanically angry yet generally virtuous we now have the muddled mess of entangled contradictions named Hercules (the Roman moniker bestowed onto the Greek Heracles.) Sired over three long nights by Zeus and the beleaguered and soon thereafter bed ridden Alcmene, Hercules was arguably the most powerfully built and martially inclined demi-god that ever pressed a foot onto the receiving Earth. To write of all his adventures and tabulate his kills would require reams upon reams of legal sized paper. So, suffice it to say that Heracles made his mark on the world more than any other from the time he throttled two serpents in his cradle when he was merely a day old through the performance of his labors, the wars with the giants, the quest for the golden fleece -which he admittedly abandoned to seek out a missing lover- to the innumerable battles and conquests. Although he littered the mythological realms with a vast array of rotting cadavers, Hercules remains to many the quintessential hero: endowed with prodigious strength, undaunted courage, and a ferocious lust for life. As the fiercely hot -or what we we hope will be fiercely hot- summer days arrive, the hot-blooded Hercules will loom high in the firmament: an example of both the bold and the bestial.
Tomorrow, we go through the month's celestial highlights.
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