Pleiades cluster often the 'stars of the show'

In just about every kind of store that sells Halloween decorations and greeting cards, you will see some sort of cartoon or drawing of a silhouetted witch flying on her broom against the disk of a full moon.

Because of this, I think a lot of people get the idea that we always have a full moon every Halloween. That's simply not the case. In fact, the next Halloween with a full moon won't be until 2020!

A better celestial symbol for Halloween is the Pleiades star cluster, otherwise known as the "Seven Little Sisters." Barring cloudy skies, they can be found every single Halloween, rising high enough to be easily seen by around 8 p.m. Just look in the low Butler eastern skies and you can't miss it.

The Pleiades look like a miniature Little Dipper, and some stargazers have actually mistaken it for the famous constellation of the northern sky. Most people can easily see six stars with the naked eye and kids that eat all their carrots can see all seven.

With binoculars or a small telescope you can see well over a hundred stars dazzling back at you. The Pleiades are often the "stars of the show" during my late autumn stargazing classes.

The Pleiades have much more than a cosmetic connection with Halloween. In fact, this beautiful little cluster of stars is possibly what started the idea of Halloween. The cluster was a sign of death and destruction. Right around the time of Halloween it was nearly overhead at midnight and many ancient civilizations worldwide honored their dead on that night.

Many believed that was the night the souls of the recently departed reached their final destination for eternity. It's no accident the Christian feast of All Souls falls on Halloween evening, when the Pleiades are sky-high at midnight.

The Pleiades were also greatly feared by ancient societies as remote from each other as Egypt, Ceylon, Mexico and Britain, because they believed catastrophe or even the end of the world was eventually going to occur when the Pleiades reached their Halloween midnight zenith. They conducted all-night ceremonies with prayers and sacrifices to ward off their demise.

Sometimes this didn't work. Legend and speculation was that great cataclysms like the great flood of the Bible, the plagues of Egypt, horrible volcano eruptions or even the sinking of the continent of Atlantis followed a Halloween midnight culmination of the Pleiades.

The Pleiades got their nickname of the "Seven Little Sisters" from Modern Greek mythology. The seven sisters were the seven daughters of Atlas, one of the older Greek gods who rebelled against Zeus, the new king of the gods. When Zeus finally defeated Atlas he punished him by making him bear the weight of the entire world on his shoulders.

It is said that his seven daughters, who make up the Pleiades, are still huddled together in the heavens weeping over his eternal punishment.

Astronomically, the Pleiades are not feared but marveled at. It's classified as an open cluster of very young stars not more than 100 million years old, which is infancy when you're talking about stars.

Stars tend to be gravitationally born in large clusters like these out of huge clouds of hydrogen gas and dust that's strewn all around not only our home Milky Way galaxy, but billions of other galaxies in our known universe as well.

I call the young clusters the ultimate "nuclear family." After several thousand orbits or so around our galaxy the cluster will be pulled about by the gravity of other stars.

With a good enough telescope you can even see some of the gaseous nebulosity surrounding the stars.

It's believed that during its Milky Way travels the young star cluster has run into another cloud of hydrogen, and the bright light from the stars is reflecting off the cloud. The Pleiades are fairly near to us, only 400 light-years away. There are thousands of stars in an area just under 14 light-years across.

The Pleiades are so well known that they're even used in marketing. In Japan the cluster is known as Subaru. Sound familiar? The seven Japanese car companies that merged to form Subaru in the early 50s used a diagram of the Seven Little Sisters as their corporate logo.

In more recent years, they modified their logo a bit, but it's still a cluster of stars.

Because of the wobbling of the Earth's axis the Pleiades are no longer at their zenith at midnight, but they still ride high in the heavens. The cluster of Halloween is a celestial beacon for ghosts, goblins and all other denizens of Halloween night!

Mike Lynch is an amateur astronomer and professional broadcast meteorologist for WCCO Radio in Minneapolis and is author of the book, "Pennsylvania Starwatch," available at bookstores and at his website www.lynchandthestars.com.