“Yes, that’s why the moon and the stars come out only when it gets dark,” said Uncle Henry. “You see the earth turns round and carries us to its dark side, the side that is away from the sun. We say ‘The sun has set.’ Then when the sun glare is gone from our eyes we can see the sky-pictures, just as Paul sees one picture better with his back to the lamp than he does the other when he has to look through the lamp-light toward it.”
“And the stars are in the sky all day long, whether we see them or not?” asked Paul.
“Certainly,” said Uncle Henry. “If you could look up at the sky from the bottom of a very deep well, or a tall chimney, so that the sun-light was kept out of your eyes, you could see the stars shining in the daytime. There is a long deep tunnel in the great pyramid of Egypt that goes up and out from the centre of its base toward its north side at just the right angle so that the ancient Egyptians could always see the pole star through it—no matter whether it was night or daytime. You see the pole star never rises or sets, because it is always right over the end of the axis that the earth spins on.”
This picture shows how the tunnel in the great pyramid always pointed to the north star because the tunnel is always parallel to the axis the earth spins on.
When the pyramid was built, the star in the tip of the little bear’s tail was not the pole star, as it is now. At that time the star that was nearest the pole was one of those in the dragon. Since the pole of the earth goes round in a complete circle among the stars every 25,000 years, the star in Draco will some time be the pole-star again—in, say 20,000 more years!
Peter had picked up the Almanac that Uncle Henry had borrowed from Katy and suddenly cried,
“Oh, Uncle Henry, the Almanac has a lot of the Star People in it. It calls them ‘The Signs of the Zodiac.’ What’s the Zodiac, Uncle Hen?”
“We are going to find out right away, Pete,” said Uncle Henry, “but first we must draw pictures of the twelve star folks that are the Zodiac signs. That means three drawings apiece. Pull up your chairs to the table and we’ll draw on the sheets of scratch paper with Betty’s colored pencils. Paul, you do the Virgo, Leo, and Cancer the Crab; Peter will draw Gemini the Twins, Taurus the Bull, and Aries the Ram; Betty will do the Fishes, called Pisces in Latin, Aquarius the Water Carrier, and Capricornus the Goat; while I will draw Sagittarius the Archer, Scorpio, and Libra the Balance. All old friends of ours.”
“We’ll put the Almanac here in the middle of the table where we can all see it while we copy the ‘signs,’ one on each sheet of paper.”