For the observation of the heavens at the epoch of the Summer Solstice, observers who are situated at least as far south as 40° north latitude have an advantage over those whose place on the earth is much farther north, because in the more northern regions sunset occurs later, and in England and Northern Europe the day, at this time, may exceed sixteen hours in length, while twilight is perceptible throughout the night. This interferes with the brilliancy of the stars.
CHART II—THE SUMMER EVENING SKY
At no other season do the heavenly bodies seem so intimately associated with the earth as in summer. All nature is now attuned, and the stars glow softly in the tepid atmosphere, stirred by faint breezes, like veritable flowers of the sky. The firmament becomes a vast garden lit with beautiful lamps, which seem to have been placed there to dimly illuminate nocturnal wanderers in the transparent gloom beneath. Their beauty is as refreshing as the cooling breath of night itself. A mystic influence steals from them over the earth.
“If a man would be alone,” says Emerson, “let him look at the stars.”
Yet he cannot be alone with them; they are too friendly; they speak too plainly a universal language, which, though he cannot translate it, he feels in every fibre. There is nothing more absolutely common to all men than the influence of the stars. No one ever gazed up at them without feeling a change come over his spirit. Truly, “they separate between him and what he touches.” They free him from the bondage of time and space. There is no trouble that they cannot assuage. And there is no time like the summer for becoming intimate with them. One who has been touched by the magic of their love could lie all the night long on a bed of pine-needles and fill his soul with their beauty. The march of red Antares and his glittering retinue across the meridian while the earth sleeps in solstitial calm—who can describe that pageant?
Antares is the summer star, and with it and the Scorpion we will begin. Not so bright as Arcturus or Vega, which are now high aloft, it has a charm peculiar to itself, arising partly from its fervid color, partly from its surroundings, and partly from its position, not too high above the southern horizon, which renders observation of the star comparatively easy. The color is so distinctive that one might think that he could recognize Antares chromatically if it were suddenly transported to some other region of the sky and placed amid a strange environment. Sometimes a flash of its fiery rays, striking sidewise into the eye as one is looking elsewhere, startles the observer like a red meteor. It is well named Antares—“Anti-Mars.” With the telescope the wonder of color is increased, for close by the great star the glass reveals a smaller one of a vivid green, an all but incredible combination of complementarily tinted suns. And these suns are undoubtedly actually linked together into a system, so that, if there are planets revolving around both or either, the inhabitants of those planets may behold the spectacle of two suns, one crimson and the other emerald! The large star is of the first magnitude, and the small one of the seventh; angular distance 3″.7.
The companion of Antares is historically associated with the most interesting of American astronomers, a man whose life was a romance, Gen. O. M. Mitchel. When his long-cherished design of setting up a great telescope in America was at last fulfilled, at Cincinnati, in 1845, one of his first achievements was the discovery, to the surprise of the astronomers of Europe, of the green star hiding in the rays of Antares. At times it has been seen emerging from behind the moon, after an occultation, ahead of its red comrade.
With a parallax of 0″.02, Newcomb estimated the luminosity of Antares at nine hundred times that of our sun, and yet the spectroscope indicates that it is a dying sun, fast approaching extinction. In its younger days it may have been an orb of prodigious splendor.
The constellation Scorpio, of which Antares is the leader, is one of the best marked in the sky. The two small stars Sigma (σ) and Tau (τ), standing like attendants on either side of Antares, lend a singular aspect to the central part of the constellation. Antares is usually represented as the heart of the imaginary scorpion. Below Tau a curving row of stars dips to the southern horizon, and then rises, farther eastward, terminating with a conspicuous pair in the uplifted sting. West of Antares a nearly vertical row represents the head. Of the stars in this row, Beta (β) is interesting as a fine and easily seen double, the distance being about 13″. A higher magnifying power shows that the larger star has another faint companion, distant only 0″.7. Nu (ν) is also telescopically interesting, for it consists of two pairs of stars. Observe in [Chart VII] the strange way in which the outlines of the constellation have been swung into loops in order to include certain stars in Scorpio, recalling the crooked boundary between Switzerland and Italy, by which each reserves particular peaks of the Alps for itself.