Field Notes––

What’s Up? Orion The Hunter Rises In The Night Sky

By Dottie Evans

Good things come in threes. Hard killing frosts, cold starry nights, and Orion rising in the east.

By Thanksgiving week, the wood should be piled, the leaves raked, and the yard put to bed. If we didn’t quite finish our “To Do” list, we can adopt the philosophy that in the greater scheme of things, a little outdoor untidiness is not going to matter. There simply needs to be a warm place to get in out of the cold and someone welcoming us at the front door.

I greatly enjoy long, cozy evenings spent inside, but I also look forward to the nightly ritual of stepping out the back door at 10 pm and stargazing while my dogs have their last hurrah. Mind you, this can be an agonizingly lengthy process, since they seem to feel no urgency to get the job done. They simply trot off into the darkness, while I stand still and keep a shivering watch.

To distract myself, I’ll concentrate on the tangy smell of smoke from my neighbor’s wood stove, listen to the occasional hoot of an owl in the distant woods, and note the faint rustling through un-raked leaves of dogs who are not in any special hurry to finish their appointed job.

I begin ticking off my short list of “most favorite and must find” stars and constellations. There’s the Big Dipper tipped slightly downward as though to spill a few drops of water over its rim, and the North Star just five rim-lengths up from the dipper’s far edge. The sideways W of Cassiopeia is higher on the right, and the faint glow of the seven-star Pleiades cluster can be found higher yet.

Finally, Orion the Hunter, the myth maker, full of bright stars and the birthplace of galaxies strides into focus. There is so much to see in Orion. You could study it for much longer than it takes a couple of dogs to come back from their late-night wanderings.

First, find the familiar pattern of three bright stars in Orion’s belt. Arranged in a nice even row, they slant upward from left to right, shining bright as beacons. From there, it’s easy to make out Orion’s broad torso. His right shoulder (looking to my left) is the red star Betelguese, a variable supergiant that is between 920 and 500 times bigger than our Sun.

The name Betelguese actually means “Armpit of the Central One” in Arabic, because the Arabs believed the stars of this constellation looked like a sheep rather than a hunter. Across the centuries, different cultures put different names to the shapes they found in the stars, and since the stars themselves are moving, even the shapes will eventually change. But not fast enough to make a difference in our lifetimes.

The Greek myths surrounding Orion are those we know best. They tell us he was the son of Neptune, and he was so tall he could walk across the bottom of the ocean with his head sticking out of the water. Orion wooed the huntress Diana but her brother, Apollo, disapproved, so he tricked her into shooting her lover with an arrow as he traversed the ocean floor — daring her to hit that small black speck on the far horizon that turned out to be Orion’s head.

In another version, Orion, the skilled hunter and handsome braggart, claims he will slay all the animals on the earth. Followed by his two dogs, Canis Major and Canis Minor, he battles with Taurus the Bull and seems bent on accomplishing this goal. But Mother Earth, called Gaia, cannot allow this. Gaia punishes boastful Orion by sending a scorpion to bite him on the heel. Now as he marches across the winter sky with his sword and shield raised, the constellation Scorpio follows him but never catches him. When Orion sets in the west, Scorpio is just rising in the east.

Hanging down from Orion’s belt is his scabbard made up of three faint stars, except the scabbard’s middle or central “star” is actually not a star. It is the Orion Nebula –– a cloud of gas that is illuminated by the star cluster at its core. Astronomers study this mysterious region 1,630 million lights years away with intense interest because it is there that new stars are continually being born.

Looking at the Orion Nebula through my son’s telescope, I have been able (with his help) to make out four bright stars in a cluster that looks rather like a partly crushed shoebox. They are called the Trapezium and represent the most visible star grouping in the nebula. Maybe in a few hundred million years, planets like the Earth will find their orbits around new suns in the Trapezium star system. Maybe someday, astronauts will be going there.

Contemplating the incomprehensible while gazing at Orion is a great way to forget that your nose is turning to ice. While the brightest star in the sky –– Sirius in Canis Major — runs along at Orion’s heels, my own two dogs are waiting at my feet, wondering why I’m standing outside for so long on this dark November night.

We go back inside, leaving eternity for tomorrow.