Big, little pups were loyal companions

Without a doubt, one of the best groups of constellations in the night sky is what I lovingly call “Orion and his Gang.”

The majestic constellation Orion is surrounded by a bevy of bright stars and constellations. I’ll say without any hesitation that it’s my favorite part of the night sky and makes bundling up for winter stargazing worth it.

Even if you don’t notice much of the starry show going on over your head every clear Butler night, you still have to be at least mildly impressed with Orion’s gang in the southern evening sky.

Surrounding the mighty hunter with his cinched belt of three bright stars in a row are the bright constellations like Taurus the Bull, with the bright Pleiades star cluster; Auriga the Chariot Driver turned goat farmer; Gemini the Twins; and Canis Major and Canis Minor, the Big and Little Dogs. The hounds of the heavens are found to the lower left of Orion.

Canis Major and Minor are not the only doggy constellations in the sky. There’s also Canes Venatici, the Hunting Dogs, but it’s a very minor constellation that is very low in the northeastern sky this time of year, just a little to the right of the Big Dipper’s handle.

Canis Major and Minor will give you a lot more bark and bite, especially the big dog of the sky, Canis Major.

Canis Major is one of those select constellations that actually resembles what it’s supposed to be. It really, really looks like a dog up on its hind legs, begging for food at the foot of his master Orion.

Sirius, the brightest star in the night sky, marks the cold nose of the big pooch. The next brightest star you see just to the right of Sirius is Mirzam, which denotes the elevated front paw.

To the lower left of Sirius there’s a nearly perfect triangle of stars that marks Canis Major’s hind end, his back paw and his tail.

The star Aludra at the tip of the tail is one of the more distant naked eye stars in the night sky at more than 3,200 light years away, with just one light-year clocking in at nearly six trillion miles.

If you see a star like Aludra that’s so far away, common sense tells you straight away that you’re looking at one gargantuan star.

In fact, most astronomers believe Aludra is more than 28 million miles in diameter. Our own sun isn’t even one million miles in diameter. Aludra also kicks out more than 100,000 times the light of our sun.

As impressive as Aludra’s stats are, the star that really gets your attention in Canis Major is Sirius, the brightest star in the night sky. Sirius is a Greek name that translates into English as “the scorcher.”

Its brilliance is chiefly due to its close proximity to us, relatively speaking. The big shiner is only 8.6 light years away, or about 50 trillion miles.

Sirius is about twice the mass and twice the diameter of our sun.

A fun thing to do with Sirius is to look at it with a small telescope or even a pair of binoculars, especially when it’s really low in the sky and its light has to pierce through more of Earth’s atmosphere. That causes the light to scintillate violently, making it flicker with all of the colors of the rainbow, kind of like a cosmic kaleidoscope.

As long as you have the small scope or binoculars out, scan the heavens about three degrees or about six full moon-lengths below and slightly to the right of Sirius for a small cluster of faint stars that astronomers call Messier object 41, or M41 for short.

It’s a cluster of about 100 young stars ranging in age from 200 to 240 million years old, and believe it or not, that’s considered young for stars. It’s about 25 light years in diameter and about 2,300 light years from Earth.

Stars are born in huge clusters out of the same humongous cloud of hydrogen gas and dust.

Compared to Canis Major, Canis Minor is a joke. It’s basically just a line between two stars, the relatively bright star Procyon and the somewhat dimmer Gomeisa, and that’s it.

I’ve always suggested that it should be referred to as the little wiener dog. Canis Minor is just a little to the upper left of Sirius and Canis Major.

As I told you last week, one of the coolest things to see in that part of the late winter sky is what’s called “The Winter Triangle.” It’s an absolutely perfect triangle with the bright stars Procyon, Sirius and Betelgeuse at Orion’s armpit.

It’s really amazing, especially when you remember these three stars are nowhere near each other physically, outside of being stellar members of our Milky Way galaxy.

According to Greek and Roman mythology, Canis Major and Canis Minor are the hunting dogs of the nocturnal hermit Orion.

Zeus, the king of the gods, had a hit put out on Orion because of his advances on Zeus’s daughter Artemis. When Orion was done for, he and his two favorite hunting dogs were magically transformed into the stars and constellations we see all winter and into early spring.

Take the dogs of winter for a walk with your night vision eyes!

Celestial conjunction

Early this week the first quarter moon passes through the constellation Taurus the Bull, not far from the bright star cluster the Pleiades in the high southwestern early evening sky. The Pleiades are also known as the “Seven Little Sisters.”

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.