Tails part of tale of heavenly bears
Last month I featured the Big Dipper, which according to modern protocol is not considered an actual constellation but rather just the rear end and the tail of Ursa Major, the Big Bear.
Currently the Big Dipper is hanging diagonally in the northwestern evening sky. The four stars that outline the pot also outline the hind end of the Ursa Major and the Big Dipper’s handle is the stretched out tail of the bear. How the tail got stretched is a big part of the classic tale of the heavenly bears.
Ursa Major’s head is made up of three dimmer stars that form a skinny triangle just below the pot of the Big Dipper. These stars aren’t as bright as the seven stars of the Big Dipper but you should be able to spot them unless you’re really plagued by heavy pollution.
Extending to the left of the head and derrière of the bear are his front and rear legs respectively. Both the front and back paws are marked by two closely knit pairs of stars.
The stars that make up the Little Dipper are the same stars that make up Ursa Minor, the Little Bear, also with a stretched out tail.
At the end of the tail of the Little Bear or the end of the handle of the Little Dipper is Polaris, the North Star. It’s certainly not the brightest star in the night sky but it’s a pivotal star, (awful pun!)
Polaris marks the position of the North celestial pole. Polaris shines directly above the Earth’s North pole so as the Earth rotates on its axis, once every 24 hours we see a reflection of that rotation in the heavens as all the stars revolve around Polaris. It’s as if the celestial bears are constantly circling their den.
Through the nearly 20 year history of this column I told you the Greek/Roman mythology about how the Big and Little Bear wound up in the night sky with stretched out tails. Zeus, the king of the gods fell in love with Callisto, a widow who lost her husband in a war some years back. It would have been just fine except Zeus was already married to Hera, the queen of gods. Worse yet, Hera caught Zeus and Callisto together and promptly changed Callisto into a bear and she ran away on all fours off in the forest to live the life of bear.
Not only did Zeus lose his girlfriend but what made this even more of a tragedy was that Arcus, Callisto’s only child lost his mother. The poor kid had no idea what happened to his mom. All he knew was she was gone. Arcus was raised by relatives and grew into a fine young man who fancied hunting ... and wouldn’t you know he loved hunting bears.
Sure enough, one day from his perch on Mount Olympus Zeus spotted Arcus aiming at arrow at a big mama bear. Thinking there was a chance that this bear was actually Callisto, Zeus tore down to the scene with lightning speed. The bear was indeed Callisto. Zeus tried in vain to convince Arcus not to shoot his mother but the young man thought Zeus was nuts. Just before the arrow flew from Arcus’s bow, Zeus did the only thing he could and turned Arcus into a little bear. Once Arcus became a bear he recognized his mom and there were huge bear hugs.
Paranoid that Hera would catch him with the bears, Zeus grabbed both bears and flung them into the heavens by their tails, greatly stretching them out in the process. I tried to make a long story but it’s difficult with this tale of the tails.
There are other stories about the stars we call the Big Bear, but in just about all of them all there is to the Big Bear is the Big Dipper. One of my favorites comes from the Zunis, an American Indian tribe in western New Mexico, a land I’ve really come to love.
They see our Big Dipper as a great heavenly bear that patrols the night skies preventing the frozen gods from the north hauling in their cold, icy winds. During the winter months the bear heads below the horizon at that more southern latitude and the cold gods are free to have their way, blowing in bone chilling cold, snowstorms, ice and more. By spring the bear reappears in the evening sky and the cold gods quickly retreat northward and the land becomes warm and sunny again.
Another piece of Ursa Major I lore really like comes from the Basque region of Spain, but in this case the Big Dipper isn’t a bear at all or even part of a bear.
The story goes like this: Two thieves broke into a farmer’s barn and stole a pair of oxen. The extremely upset farmer sent his housekeeper and a servant out after the thieves. He also sent along his errant bulldog, who was supposed to be in charge of security.
After a few hours, the highly irritated and impatient farmer also joined the chase.
This whole scene is graphically portrayed every night when you see the Big Dipper. The two stars on the right side of the pot section of the dipper are the two oxen. The two stars on the left side of the pot are the thieves. The next star to the left in the dipper’s handle is the servant followed by the housekeeper represented by the middle star of the handle. The last star in the handle is the furious farmer.
What about the dog? The pooch is a faint star you can barely see right next to the housekeeper star in the middle of the handle. Incidentally, we know the brighter housekeeper star as Mizar and the faint watchdog star as Alcor. See if you can spot the dog.
This week
Mars and Saturn are still holding court together in the low southeast sky in the early evening. They’re both pretty close to their minimum distance from the Earth for this year.
Mike Lynch is an amateur astronomer and professional broadcast meteorologist for WCCO Radio in Minneapolis/Paul and is author of the book, “Stars, a Month by Month Tour of the Constellations” published by Adventure Publications available at bookstores at http://www.adventurepublications.net
