Scorpius sting

OK, I’ll admit it. I have mixed feel­ings about the night. On one hand, you can’t see much of the uni­verse dur­ing the day.

How­ever, fear of the night is a pri­mal part of us all. It’s not so much what we see as what we don’t see. It’s the unknown that makes us fear the night.

As our ancient ances­tors hud­dled around their fires and lis­tened to the mys­te­ri­ous noises around them, they must have looked up at the stars with dread as well as awe. Death came unan­nounced out of the night.

No con­stel­la­tion elic­its our ani­mal fear of the night like Scor­pius, the Scorpion.

Scor­pius is one of the few con­stel­la­tions that actu­ally look like the thing for which it is named. Scor­pi­ons are bugs, and they look like them. They can be as short as an inch long, but their sting is deadly. Scor­pius looks like it marched right out of one of those old Japan­ese mon­ster movie — a giant, evil-looking crea­ture stand­ing low in the south­ern sky dur­ing the sum­mer months.

By the way, the con­stel­la­tion is called Scor­pius, not Scor­pio. Only astrologers, not astronomers, call it Scor­pio. Unless you intend to pre­dict the future with it, you should call it Scorpius.

The head of the scor­pion is a line of three stars close to each other far­thest to the north. The “body” is a stream of stars that go straight south. The stinger curves around like a fish­hook to the east and then north again.

To the left of the stinger are two clus­ters of stars, num­bers 6 and 7 in the Messier cat­a­log (M6 and M7). From a rural observ­ing sight, they should be just vis­i­ble to the naked eye as small fuzzy patches. They resolve into many stars with a pair of binoculars.

At the cen­ter of the scorpion’s body is the star Antares, which looks like a shim­mer­ing drop of blood as it twin­kles close to the hori­zon. Its name means “rival to Ares,” the Greek god of war. Cer­tainly a lot of blood was shed in his name.

Accord­ing to ancient myth, the great hunter Orion was brought down not by a wild ani­mal or the sword of an enemy, but by the lowly Scor­pion. Orion so feared the Scor­pion, that it is said that he begged the gods not to put it and him in the sky together. Thus the sum­mer con­stel­la­tion Scor­pius does not rise in the south until the win­ter con­stel­la­tion Orion has just set completely.

Scor­pius is also said to be respon­si­ble for the cre­ation of deserts on the

Earth. A Greek myth says that the scor­pion fright­ened the horses that pull the sun across the sky and caused them to bolt wildly. Out of con­trol, the horses briefly dragged the sun too close to the Earth. Deserts, drought, and famine were the result.

Thus is Scor­pius asso­ci­ated with death, war, and famine.

We can pre­dict with cer­tainty the motions of the stars and plan­ets. They are sym­bols of our under­stand­ing and even con­quest over nature.

Scor­pius serves to remind us that nature is still unpre­dictable and even deadly. As William Cullen Bryant writes:

Man fore­tells afar

The courses of the stars; the very hour

He knows when they shall darken or grow bright;

Yet doth the eclipse of Sor­row and of Death

Come unfore­warned.

So as you walk some south­ern beach this sum­mer on a mid­night stroll, look down, my friends, and beware the Scorpion’s sting. But look up, as well, and admire its awful majesty.

Plan­ets

Sat­urn is get­ting lower in the south­west just after dark. It shines pale yel­low above the bright star Spica in the con­stel­la­tion Virgo. You’ll need your own tele­scope or a trip to Perkins to see the rings.

Mars is get­ting dim­mer and far­ther away from Earth. Look for its yellow-red glow far­ther to the south­west of Sat­urn and under­neath the con­stel­la­tion Leo.

Mer­cury is a red­dish dot very low in the west just after sun­set. You’ll prob­a­bly need binoc­u­lars to see it. For heaven’s sake, wait for full sun­set before you start scan­ning. Point­ing any opti­cal instru­ment at the sun acci­den­tally will wreck your eyes. Once you’ve seen it in your binos, wait for it to pop out to your unaided eyes.

Tom Burns is the direc­tor of Ohio Wes­leyan University’s Perkins Obser­va­tory, and he would be very happy to answer your ques­tions or sell you a ticket to one of its upcom­ing Friday-night pro­grams. He can be reached at tlburns@owu.edu or 740–363‑1257.

Posted by Tom Burns on Jun 24 2012. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS Feed. Comments can be made below.