There’s this star cluster in Taurus. I can’t take my eyes off it.
Which is remarkable in two ways. The first is that there’s nothing remarkable about this star cluster. It’s up there half the year, easy to find, you probably walked under it tonight.
The second is that where I live, in a sky filled with smoke stacks and clouds of varying content, it’s often not much more than a smudge. Not nearly as nice as it looks in this picture, or as you can see it in the country, or how it undoubtedly looked hundreds of years ago.
One name for it is the Seven Sisters, which is funny because no one, not us not the Sumerians not the Native Americans and not the Hubble Space Telescope, can agree on how many stars are in there.
Seven, some say. Best I’ve counted with unaided vision was five. Through my scope I’ve seen too many to count. In many cultures, in almost every hemisphere, if you could count eleven of them you were shortlisted for a place in the King’s Archers or Royal Scouts.
Best guess is about 1000 stars, all quite young, all born together in who knows what sort of mayhem. Some of them orbit each other, very slowly, and have been lined up from our perspective, for as long as we’ve been watching. That’s why we can’t accurately count them, and probably never will.
Eighty percent of the people who started reading this decided they don’t give a rat’s ass about astronomy and have already quit reading. Eighty percent of the people still reading feel pretty much the same way, but have glanced down and are wondering what Subaru has to do with it.
Which is precisely my point. My little smudgy star cluster is, as I’ve said, above your head half the year. It’s also all around you on the freeways, and maybe in your own driveway.
That’s a good enough reason, I think, and in any case it was enough to get you to this point, rat’s ass-worth or not. It got you to the end of a piece on astronomy.
And if there was no way otherwise you’d read a piece on astronomy, so much the better. Sorry if that offends, and just try to understand: guys who have a blog and who also stare up at certain star clusters even when they can’t see them…this is kind of what we were sent here to do.
