There is still another legend which tells how the scorpion came to be a constellation. In ancient Greece there was once a mighty hunter named Orion. Armed with only a club, this powerful and handsome giant was able to conquer any beast in the world but, unfortunately, he boasted so continuously that Juno resolved to teach him a lesson. One day while he was battling with a monster in a swamp, a poisonous scorpion slipped up and stung him on the heel. The wound proved fatal, although he was afterward given a constellation as if in atonement for the rather mean advantage taken of so brave a hunter.
"The vast Orion thus he doomed to die,
And fix'd him, his proud trophy, in the sky."
—Lucan's Pharsalia.
But the scorpion was also honored in the same way, only he travels across the sky in the summer months while Orion is seen during the winter. Thus the two are considerately placed so that they do not shine above the earth in the same season.
"And so 'tis said that when the Scorpion comes
Orion flies to the utmost ends of the earth."
—Aratus.
The constellation of the Scorpion lies southeast of Libra, the Scales, and is the ninth and most brilliant in the zodiac. The gigantic and clearly marked star design on his figure shows that the creature's head and outstretched claws extend upward and toward the west; the upraised tail, curving through the Milky Way and close to the horizon, lies south and eastward; while his feet touch the fainter stars to the right and left. In the vicinity of his heart lies a star so large and red and beautiful that it was named "Antares," which means "the rival of Ares" (the planet Mars). This star so impressed the ancient people of Greece that they built a temple in honor of it, where they might gaze upon it in solitude and worship it as if it were enthroned. This temple is one of the oldest found in Greece.
Pease, with the aid of the interferometer on the great 101-inch telescope on Mount Wilson, has measured the diameter of Antares and has found it to be a very enormous red sun. This figure taken in connection with the best determined value of its distance, indicates that its diameter is four hundred million miles! The volume of this star is therefore about twenty-five million times as great as the volume of our sun. As far as we know, this is the largest star. This is surely most interesting. We might have imagined these gloriously tinted stars as small-sized novelties scattered about the heavens for our special edification—certainly we did not expect to find that some of them were so tremendously large that they would pass by our little golden orb as a speck of incandescent sand.
