Don’t miss ‘7 Little Sisters’

It certainly doesn’t happen every Halloween, but this year we have a full moon, or almost that is.

Actually the full moon this week will be on Tuesday night. On Saturday night for Halloween we’ll have a waning full moon that will resemble a lopsided football.

It won’t come up until around 10 p.m., but when it does rise above the east-southeast horizon it will sport a classic pumpkin orange color. That’s compliments of the Earth’s thicker atmosphere near the horizon. By the way, the next Halloween that will have a full moon won’t be until the year 2020.

I think the marquee celestial symbol for Halloween is the Pleiades star cluster, otherwise known as the “Seven Little Sisters.”

The cluster will be high enough to see in the Butler northeast sky by 8 p.m. all week. You can’t miss it, as the Pleiades resemble a miniature Little Dipper. Some stargazers actually mistake it for the real Little Dipper, also known as Ursa Minor, hanging in the northern sky.

Most people can easily see six stars in the Pleiades with the naked eye, and if you really chomp down on your carrots you may see all seven of the Little Sisters. With binoculars or a small telescope you can see far more than a hundred stars dazzling back at you.

The Pleiades are often the “stars of the show” during my late autumn stargazing classes.

The Pleiades are 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 the huge clouds of hydrogen gas and dust strewn all around our home Milky Way galaxy, as well as the billions of other galaxies in the known universe.

I call these young clusters the ultimate “nuclear family.” After several thousand orbits around our galaxy the cluster will be pulled apart by the gravity of other stars.

In photos of the Pleiades you see some of the gaseous nebulosity surrounding the stars. Astronomers used to think that this was leftover hydrogen gas and dust that the stars of the Pleiades were birthed from.

Now it’s believed that the young star has run into another cloud of hydrogen and that the bright light from the stars is reflecting off the cloud. The Pleiades are fairly close to us, only 400 light-years away, and if you’re new to this column, one light-year equals a little less than 6 trillion miles. There are thousands of stars in an area just under 14 light-years across.

The Pleiades has much more than a cosmetic connection with Halloween. In fact, this beautiful little cluster of stars is possibly what got the idea of Halloween started. 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 souls of the recently departed reached their final destination for eternity. It’s no accident that 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 that catastrophe or even the end of the world was eventually going to occur when the Pleiades reached its Halloween midnight zenith.

They conducted all-night ceremonies with prayers and sacrifice 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. This little cluster was notorious and a menace to all!

The Pleiades got the 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. You may have seen the statue or a picture of old Atlas propping up the world. It’s said that his seven daughters, who make up the Pleiades, are still huddled together in the heavens weeping over the eternal punishment of their father.

This has nothing to do with Halloween, but have you ever seen the star cluster logo on the front grill of Subaru cars? It has a direct connection to the Pleiades. In Japan the Pleiades are known as Subaru.

The seven Japanese car companies that merged to form Subaru in the early 1950s used a diagram of the Seven Little Sisters as the corporate logo. Over the years the logo was modified a bit, but it’s still a cluster of stars.

Have a fun, safe, and stellar Halloween.

Celestial hugging

The great celestial hugging between Venus, Jupiter, and Mars culminates in the early morning pre-twilight eastern sky. Early this week Venus and Jupiter are only separated by only a degree.

With a pair of binoculars you can see both of them in same field of view. Venus will resemble a half moon and there will be tiny little stars on either side of Jupiter that are the big planet’s largest moons.

You might even see some of Jupiter’s cloud bands. Mars is not quite as bright but is only about four degrees away from Venus and Jupiter. Don’t miss the great morning planet show.

Even though the planets are close in the sky they’re actually a long way from each other. They just happen to be in the same line of sight.

Venus is the closest at 63 million miles away, Mars is 213 million miles, and giant Jupiter is better than 565 million miles from this part of the solar system.

Mike Lynch is an amateur astronomer and professional broadcast meteorologist for WCCO Radio in Minneapolis/St. Paul and is author of the book, “Stars, a Month by Month Tour of the Constellations” published by Adventure Publications and available at bookstores and at www.adventurepublications.net.