From Corvus the eye wanders naturally to its neighbor on the west, Crater, the “Cup.” Both of these constellations rest on the back of the long serpentine Hydra. Crater is far less conspicuous than Corvus; but its resemblance to a cup is rather striking, although the imaginary vessel lies tipped up on its side with the open part toward the east. Among the many ascriptions of this starry cup in ancient mythology to various gods and goddesses, none is more interesting than that which made it the cup of Medea, thus including Crater among the numerous constellations which were associated in the imagination of the Greeks with their great romance of the Argonautic Expedition. Its brightest stars are only of the fourth and fifth magnitudes, and individually not worth much attention.
Hydra, which stretches its immense coils across about seven hours of right ascension, passing under Cancer, Leo, Crater, Corvus, Virgo, and a part of Libra, also carries the mind back through the golden mists of the morning of Greek mythology to the adventures of Jason and his crew of Argonauts, for it was once identified with the Aonian Dragon. It would be interesting to inquire how much of the perennial fascination of this ancient romance may be due to its traditional association with the stars. Look first at the head of Hydra, now well west of the meridian, below the glimmering “Beehive” in Cancer. It is marked by five stars of various magnitudes making an irregular pentagon. Then let the eye follow the line down southeastward until it encounters Cor Hydræ, or Alphard, the latter its Arabic name, meaning the “Solitary One.” It is of the second magnitude and of a reddish color, and the space about it is vacant of conspicuous stars. There is an attraction about these solitary bright stars that is almost mystical, their very loneliness lending interest to the view, as when one watches some distant snow-clad peak gleaming in the rays of sunset after all the lower mountains have sunk into the blue shadows of coming night. Cor Hydræ is the Alpha (α) of its constellation.
Above Hydra, northeast of Cor Hydræ, at the crossing of the ecliptic and the meridian, is the great star Regulus in Leo, the “Lion.” It stands at the lower end of the handle of a very distinctly marked sickle-shaped figure, which includes the breast, head, and mane of the imaginary lion. Regulus is not only a beautiful star, but it possesses much practical importance as one of the principal “nautical stars,” having been employed by sailors ever since the beginning of navigation to determine their place at sea. The sun almost runs over this star about the 20th of August, and every month the moon passes close beside it, and sometimes occults it. Thus it serves as a golden mile-stone in the sky. It has strangely affected the imagination of mankind in all ages. From the remotest times it has everywhere been known as the “royal star” par excellence. In Greek it was βασιλίσκος, in Latin Rex, from which Copernicus constructed our name, Regulus. There are three other “royal stars,” Aldebaran, Antares, and Fomalhaut, but Regulus has always been, in a certain way, their chief. For five thousand years it has been believed, traditionally, to control the affairs of heaven, and the astrologers have seized upon this idea by making it the natal star of kings, and those destined to kingly achievements and rule. In our age of science we may safely indulge these fancies; they can now do no harm, and they add immensely to the interest with which we regard the star that gave birth to them. When the “Royal Star” crosses high on the meridian in the vernal evenings, the imagination is thrown back over almost the whole course of the history of the Aryan race, and the rays of Regulus bring again the dreams of Babylon and Nineveh, of Greece and Rome, of India, and of the star-watching deserts of Arabia. Cyrus, in his conquering marches, may have looked to that star for help and inspiration, for it was the heavenly guardian of the Persian monarchs.
The spectroscope tells us that Regulus, like Spica, is approaching us, but less rapidly, drawing nearer about 475,000 miles per day. But its distance is 950,000,000,000,000 miles (parallax 0″.02), and it outshines the sun one thousand times.
The second star above Regulus, in the curve of the sickle’s blade, is Gamma (γ), or Algieba (Arabic the “Forehead”), a beautiful double, probably binary, with a period of revolution which Doberck has estimated at about four hundred years. The larger star of the pair is golden-orange and the smaller bronze-green, a marvellous contrast, and an ordinary telescope shows well the spectacle, the distance between the components being 3″.78. And this wonderful pair is rushing toward the solar system at the rate of two million miles per day. Yet so great is its distance that we have no record that in a thousand years men have noticed a brightening of the headlight of this terrible locomotive of space! But probably the more refined methods of the present time, if applied for a similar period, would reveal an ominous expansion of that oncoming light. Gamma is interesting as marking, roughly, the spot in the sky which was the apparent centre of radiation for the November meteors, which were last seen in their splendor in 1866-67, their return in 1899-1900, for which the world had long been waiting, having been prevented by the disturbing attraction of Jupiter and Saturn, which shifted their orbit.
The “Sickle” in its entirety is an attractive asterism, and hanging so conspicuously in the sky on a spring evening it may be imaginatively regarded as a harbinger of the opening of the season when the thoughts of men are turning to preparations for future harvests. In the height of the harvest season the “Sickle” sets near sundown, then no longer standing upright, but lying along upon the horizon—a symbol of the wearied husbandman’s approaching hours of rest:
“Nor shall a starry night his hopes betray.”
Away off at the eastern end of the constellation, in the lion’s tail, shines its second star in rank, Denebola (Arabic Al Dhanab, the “Tail”). It too is speeding hitherward, but only half as fast as Gamma. Like Aldebaran, the name Denebola has an indefinite charm, from its full round vowel sounds, and a certain nobility in the look of it as it lies on the printed page. As with many sonorous Indian names in American geography, these old star names lose something of their effect when they are translated. It is better to take them as they stand, transcending terrestrial analogy and definition, like the sublime objects that they designate.
Northeast of Denebola lies the small constellation of Coma Berenices, “Berenice’s Hair,” remarkable for the confused glitter of the small scattered stars of which it consists. It is a constellation with a romantic history which I shall not retell here. It forms an attraction for an opera-glass.
We now return to the region of sky above the head of Hydra, west of the meridian. There the attention is arrested by a glimmering spot, a kind of starry cobweb, which represents the “Beehive” cluster in Cancer. Its classical name is Præsepe, the “Manger.” In Astronomy with the Naked Eye will be found a copy of Galileo’s drawing of the stars of Præsepe as they appeared to him with his newly invented telescope. It is delightful to look at them on a clear night with a large opera-glass or a small telescope. They are an example of that clustering tendency so often seen among the stars, and which reaches its most wonderful manifestations in such assemblages as the famous globular clusters in Hercules and Centaurus, where countless thousands of small stars appear to be so crowded together that in the centre they run up into a perfect blaze. But in Præsepe there is no such apparent crowding, though the stars are so numerous that they resemble a swarm of bees. The probability is that none of the stars in this company is as large as our sun—although we cannot be perfectly sure because we do not know their distance—but they are, nevertheless, true stellar bodies, solar children, which seem playing together, overwatched by larger stars, waiting not far away. Plato, or his disciples, taking the suggestion from older dreamers, regarded Præsepe as a gateway of souls through which descended the spirits that were to animate the bodies of men during their earthly life. There are moods in which one can hardly consider our coldly scientific way of treating such celestial wonders as being essentially superior to the more spiritual ideas and suggestions of the visionaries of antiquity, before man became possessed with the notion that all science is summed up in measurement. Unquestionably we have more “facts,” but have we more inspiration? Are we as near to the stars as were those who knew less about them? Have we yet got the key to unlock the universe? Do many of us comprehend the dictum of one of our own modern sages—“Hitch your wagon to a star”?