STAR GAZER
THE INTERNATIONAL EDITION
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Horkheimer: Greetings, greetings fellow star gazers. On the evenings of Thursday May 22nd and Friday May 23rd the red planet Mars will pay a visit to an exquisite cluster of stars known as both the Manger and the Beehive. So if you've never seen the Manger or the Beehive before now is your chance to find it using Mars as the finder. Let me show you.
O.K., we've got our skies set up for Thursday evening May 22nd about 10 p.m. facing due west where directly above the horizon you'll see a steadily glowing rouge gold light which is our old friend planet #4, 4,000 mile wide Mars. And if you're far, far away from city lights and if you have very good eyesight you'll also be able to see a handful of dim stars clustered together in what some fancifully imagine to be the shape of a beehive or a manger. But to really see it well you'll need a pair of binoculars, which will bring it crisply into focus. And I guess it does look something like the shape of a beehive. But since most people don't know what a manger looks like your guess is good as mine as to why it is also called the Manger.
At any rate on Thursday night the 22nd as seen through a pair of binoculars Mars will stand out brilliantly against this cluster of dim stars. And on Friday night the 23rd Mars will have moved just a little bit farther along. So go out Thursday night and look for Mars' position in front of the Beehive Cluster and then go out 24 hours later and note how it has moved in relationship to it. Now this cluster has been noted for thousands of years. In fact in ancient China it was called Tseih She Ke, which translated means "an exhalation of piled up corpses" and believe me I have no idea what that's all about.
But in modern times we refer to this cluster as M-44 which is object #44 in a list of objects put together by a gentleman named Messier, objects which do not change their position among the stars and thus should not be mistaken for comets even though they sometimes resemble them. At any rate back in the early 1600's Galileo, who was the first person to look at this cluster with a telescope, said that he saw more than 40 small stars here. Although in modern telescopes we can see about 200 stars in this group. And all told this group of stars is an incredible 11 light years in diameter and 515 light years away. Plus we now know these stars are very, very young compared to our own Sun which is about 5 billion years old. In fact these stars are estimated to have been born only 400 million years ago, the same time as dinosaurs ruled our planet.
So on Thursday the 22nd and Friday the 23rd
go outside at 10 p.m. look west and train your binoculars on Mars
as it passes in front of a star cluster born less than half a
billion years ago. And see how many stars you can count. Can you
count 40 like Galileo or even more? You just may surprise yourself.
Happy Mars, Beehive, and Manger hunting, and keep looking up!
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Horkheimer: On Thursday and Friday may 22nd and 23rd Mars will pay a visit to a lovely star cluster. On the 22nd at 10 p.m. face west and you'll see rouge gold 4,000 mile wide Mars. And if you use binoculars directly behind it you'll see a cluster of dim stars called the Beehive or Manger. 24 hours later on Friday the 23rd Mars will have changed its position. Ancient Chinese called this cluster an exhalation of piled up corpses. Yeccch! But we call it M-44 and Galileo counted more than 40 stars here. How many can you count? They are all very young stars only half a billion years old, which means they were born the same time as dinosaurs ruled our Earth. Happy Mars and Beehive/Manger hunting. Keep looking up!
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* This week's Sky At A Glance
and Planet Roundup from Sky & Telescope.Starry Night Deluxe was used to produce this episode
of Star Gazer
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