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January’s nights are unquestionably the most dramatic of all of wintertime’s skies and among the most awe-inspiring of the year. Now is also the time that the hunter becomes the hunted.
Use all the hunting dogs that you have available to you, be they binoculars, telescopes, online databases, national and dark sky parks, star parties/clubs, Fiske Planetarium shows, Sommers-Bausch Observatory events, Colorado’s vast, dark backcountry. The number of tools and amount of material that we have now in our pack is enormous. A constant stream of data and images help us continually refine our skills and profound understanding about the universe in which we live and die.
Constellation Orion, the eternal hunter, looms high and large as it culminates on the north/south meridian at its highest position of the year 9 p.m. Jan. 25. Towering 48 degrees over the horizon with seven main stars and 81 in total, you immediately know it by its three belt stars (from the left) Alnitak, Alnilam and Mintaka. Use the tools in your quiver to hunt down and capture as many celestial objects obscured by this complex terrain as you can.
Orion, frozen in perpetual combat against Taurus, is the most recognizable, accessible, beautiful and studied asterisms in the winter sky. Undoubtedly every human parent over the millennia — at least those who made the effort — has impressed their young child with this spectacle. Most of those adults, however, fell short of revealing the true nature of this area of the sky, not by any deficiency of their own but because they did not live in the golden age of astronomy as we do.
Keep in mind that a constellation is an area of the sky within an imaginary, contrived celestial sphere, a three-dimensional map with Earth at the center. The map is projected outward with areas delineated by arcs of vertical lines called right ascension, comparable to longitude, and horizontal lines called declination, comparable to latitude. In astronomy, the entire sky surrounding Earth, that is, the entire celestial sphere, is plotted out into 88 equirectangular blocks, each area defined as a distinct constellation often expressed in degrees. Orion’s constellation-block occupies 594 square degrees out of a total of 41,253 square degrees.
On the other hand, an asterism is simply any observed pattern of stars, named by tradition, convention or nothing at all. Most asterisms bear no resemblance to their names whatsoever.
Orion is one of those great exceptions. It’s easy to see the shape of a human in those seven main stars; actually, it’s impossible to avoid. Generally speaking, a person’s brain has the tendency to impose interpretations and meanings onto patterns and objects where there isn’t any through a cognitive process called pareidolia. Even knowing this, the skywatcher visualizes a giant with broad shoulders, feet/knees, a belt, scabbard/sword, and, with a little more imagination and a bunch more associated stars, a club and shield held high against a charging Taurus that culminates at 9 p.m. Jan. 15.
With binocs, scope the belt, and then drop and shoot for the scabbard, known to the astronomers of medieval Islam as “Saif al Jabbār,” the sword of the giant. The blade is made up of multiple star systems and the Orion Nebula, Messier object 42, the brightest of the set. About one degree in diameter, skywatchers can quietly track the prey down by avoiding direct eye contact and using peripheral vision.
With the naked eye, M42 appears to be the sword’s middle star, but telescopes will expose that it’s a turbulent, ominous nebula that has given birth to gigantic blue-white hot stars out of a roiling brew of hot gas, collapsing dust and intense radiation. These stars are a relatively youthful 300,000 years old, having roared into thermonuclear life at the same time that the first Homo sapiens — early hunting/gathering modern humans — emerged into a world that already had nine species of archaic humans, generally living far apart but contemporaneously, during the late Middle Pleistocene.
At that time, Homo erectus still existed in Java, Indonesia, and would do so for another 100,000-plus years. Neanderthals hunted in the steppe-tundra of Europe. A handful of small brained, stocky archaic species, including the so-called “hobbits,” populated Pacific archipelagos, South Africa and eastern China. The violent Orion Nebula stellar nursery has delivered at least 700 stars, but few are as impressive as those of the Trapezium, an open cluster of four brilliant stars centered at M42’s core. These blue giants are responsible for most of the light, heat, UV and other radiation emitted from the nebula. The most massive, Theta 1 Orionis C1, is ejecting immense volumes of gases — 100,000 times more than the sun does — from its upper atmosphere at more than 2.2 million mph (1000 km/s). Skywatchers can spot the magnitude +4.0 cluster with the naked eye even in a brilliantly lit inner city. Optical telescopes resolve four main stars, as was the case with Galileo when he discovered them in 1617. By peering through the veils of dust, the Hubble Space Telescope’s near-infrared camera and mass spectrometer have imaged many more stars in various stages of development, about half of which are exhibiting planet-forming activity.
Orion’s brightest stars Betelgeuse, the right shoulder (literally the hand), and Rigel, the left foot, are both supergiants worthy of pursuit. Your fastest quarry, the colossal variable red giant Betelgeuse, is in flight as a runaway star hurtling headlong through the interstellar medium at 67,000 mph (30 km/s) while creating a lens-shaped shockwave four light-years wide.
Both stars are relatively young, with irregularly-shaped Betelgeuse about 10 million years old to Rigel’s seven-to-nine million, but neither are long for this galaxy. Both are expected to go supernovae, and pretty soon. Rigel will die likely unseen by modern humans in a few million years, but Betelgeuse’s magnificent cataclysm is expected within the next 100,000 years. Keep looking up: it will take just one-half second for the heart core of Betelgeuse to collapse.
Highlight of note: Sirius, the brightest star in the night sky, strikes the north/south meridian six minutes after midnight Jan. 1, New Year’s Day.
The moon is full 10:54 a.m. Jan. 25, and is called the Full Wolf Moon.
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