The planet Jupiter has been a welcome addition to our Everett sky all winter and will stay with us through this spring. The largest planet of our solar system, Jupiter is 88,000 miles in diameter and is named after the king of the Roman gods. The behemoth planet starts out the evening in the high southern sky. It’s easy to find because it’s the brightest star-like object in that part of the sky.
Through a pair of binoculars or a small telescope, you’ll notice tiny little “stars” next to Jupiter, lining up on both sides of the big planet. Those are actually Jupiter’s largest and brightest moons. Jupiter has more than 65 moons but only four of them are visible to amateur astronomers. You may not see all four of them though. That’s because they orbit Jupiter in periods of 2 to 17 days, and at any given time one or more of them may be hiding in front of or behind the planet. Those moons are always on the move. I’ll have a lot more on all of Jupiter’s moons next week in Skywatch.
Not only does Jupiter have its own cluster of moons, but far not away in the April sky is one of the brightest star clusters in the heavens, admiring the king of the planets. Use a pair of binoculars or a small telescope to scan about five degrees to the right of Jupiter. Five degrees, by the way, is about half of the width of your fist at arm’s length. You may even be able to see the cluster with the naked eye. It’s known as the Beehive Cluster by most stargazers because it resembles a hoard of bees buzzing around and protecting their heavenly hive. For the next several weeks Jupiter will be hanging out next to the Beehive.
One of the first to officially document the Beehive cluster was Greek astronomer Hipparchus who observed it around 130 BC. He registered it in his star catalogue as a “cloudy star”. A little later on ancient Romans saw it as a manger and called it Praesepe, which is Latin for manger. They actually used it to help them forecast the weather. It was said that “a murky manger” was a sign of rain. That makes sense, since the blurriness indicates increasing amounts of moisture in the air.
Astronomically the Beehive is considered an open star cluster. It is a group of about a thousand young stars that emerged out of the same nebula of hydrogen gas sprinkled with heavier elements from a long since exploded star. The stars in this cluster are believed by astronomers to be about 600 million years old, and while that is considered young for a star, it is rather old for a cluster of young stars. Many of these same types of clusters are gravitationally broken up before the stars are that old, but the Beehive is hanging in there. That “teenage mob” of stars is over 150 trillion miles wide and nearly 3400 trillion miles away from your backyard and mine.
The Beehive cluster and Jupiter are residing in the one of the tiniest and faintest constellations in the sky, Cancer the Crab. Unless you’re really in the boonies forget about actually seeing the stars that make it up. They’re just too faint to bother with. Even though it’s an insignificant constellation Cancer has a great deal of mythological lore associated with it.
It was Greek mythology that made the crab out of Cancer. The Greek hero Hercules was assigned twelve labors to atone for a great sin committed when he was a young man. One of his tasks was to slay Hydra, a two-headed sea monster. Hera, the queen of the gods, was watching from her perch on Mount Olympus and saw that Hercules was gaining the upper hand on the sea beast. Hera, the original queen of mean, dispatched her pet crab Cancer to sneak up on Hercules and bite one of his big toes in an attempt to disable him. Sure enough, the crab succeeded in taking a big bite into Hercules’ toe, but instead of throwing him off his game Hercules exploded in a rage. With his bare hands he choked the life out of Hydra and at the same time kicked the crab up against a boulder. That was all she wrote for Cancer. Hera felt so bad about sending her pet to his death that she magically transformed his body into the constellation we almost see in our spring skies.
Mike Lynch is an amateur astronomer and professional broadcast meteorologist for WCCO Radio in Minneapolis.
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