No group of stars is more universally known than The Pleiades. All tribes and nations of the world, from the remotest days of recorded history up to the present time, have sung the praises of The Pleiades. They were "The Many Little Ones" of the Babylonians, "The Seven Sisters" of the Greeks, "The Seven Brothers" of the American Indians, "The Hen and Chickens" of many nations of Europe, "The Little Eyes" of the South Sea Islanders. They were honored in the religious ceremonies of the Aztecs, and the savage tribes of Australia danced in their honor. Many early tribes of men began their year with November, the Pleiad month; and on November 17th, when The Pleiades crossed the meridian at midnight, it was said that no petition was ever presented in vain to the kings of ancient Persia.
January—Taurus
Poets of all ages have felt the charm of The Pleiades. Tennyson gives the following beautiful description of The Pleiades in Locksley Hall:
"Many a night I saw the Pleiades, rising through the mellow shade,
Glitter like a swarm of fireflies tangled in a silver braid."
A well-known astronomer, not so many years ago, also felt the mysterious charm of The Pleiades and seriously expressed the belief that Alcyone, the brightest star of The Pleiades, was a central sun about which all other suns were moving. But we know that there is no foundation whatever for such a belief.
A fairly good eye, when the night is clear and dark, will make out six stars in this group arranged in the form of a small dipper. A seventh star lies close to the star at the end of the handle and is more difficult to find. It is called Pleione, and is referred to in many legends as the lost Pleiad. Persons gifted with exceptionally fine eyesight have made out as many as eleven stars in the group; and with the aid of an ordinary opera-glass, anyone can see fully one hundred stars in this cluster. Astronomers have found that The Pleiades cluster contains at least two hundred and fifty stars, all drifting slowly in the same general direction through space, and that the entire group is enveloped in a fiery, nebulous mist which is most dense around the brightest stars. It is not known whether the stars are being formed from the nebula or whether the nebula is being puffed off from the stars. The brightest star, Alcyone, is at least two hundred times more brilliant than our own sun, and all of the brighter stars in the group surpass the sun many times in brightness. It is believed that this cluster is so large that light takes many years to cross from one end of it to the other, and that it is so far from the earth that its light takes over three centuries to reach us, traveling at the rate of 186,000 miles a second.
The Hyades is a group of stars scarcely less famous than The Pleiades, and the stars in the group also form a moving cluster of enormous extent at a distance of 140 light-years from the earth.
Among the ancients, The Hyades were called the rain-stars, and the word Hyades is supposed to come from the Greek word for rain. Among the many superstitions of the past was the belief that the rising or setting of a group of stars with the sun had some special influence over human affairs. Since The Hyades set just after the sun in the showery springtime and just before sunrise in the stormy days of late fall, they were always associated with rain. In Tennyson's Ulysses we read: