The Stars.—After you have looked at the Sun, Moon, and planets to your hearts’ content turn your glass on the Big Dipper and you will see about ten times as many stars as you can see with the naked eye.
The Big Dipper is full of starry surprises as you will find to your pleasure on looking at it with your glass: for instance, instead of the handle being formed of three stars, it blazes with dozens of them.
Take a look at Alcor, which is the middle star in the handle of the Dipper. You may remember I told you in the first chapter that it had a little companion, Mizar, which only sharp eyes can see. Now look at Alcor through your glass and you will see that it and Mizar are quite widely separated.
The North Star is also a double star as these twin stars are called. Just as Mizar is a good test for the naked eye so the twin of the North Star is a good object on which you can try out the seeing power of your glass.
Another double star which some boys can separate with their keen naked eyes is Epsilon, named after one of the Greek letters (See Appendix C). This star together with Vega, a very bright and beautiful blue star of the first magnitude, and Zeta, another Greek letter star, form a triangle, which is the constellation of Lyra.
Whether or not you can separate Epsilon into two stars with the naked eye, you will see them stand out separate and distinct through your glass. If you had a more powerful glass you would see that each of the stars of Epsilon has a faint companion star, so that it is really a quadruple star, that is, there are four stars right together.
Then there is the Milky Way, always a wonderful sight to the naked eye, but still more wonderful when viewed through a glass however small; there are the stars of the Pleiades of which the eye sees not more than six or seven without help, but which bursts forth like a skyrocket into a cluster of many-colored lights when seen through a glass; these are only a few of the hundreds of other things which you can see in the sky with the help of your little telescope.
CHAPTER X
THE TIME O’ DAY
What Time Is It?—This is a question everybody is always asking everybody else.
Did you ever stop to think what a curious thing time is? No one knows when it began nor can anyone tell when it will end, yet we measure off a little bit from that which has gone or from that which is yet to come, so that we may know when to eat, to start to work, or to quit, and when to go to bed or to get up.