Aren't these interesting names? Mizar, Alcor, Saidak. They sound so Arabian, and remind one of the "Arabian Nights." At first, some of them will seem hard, but you will come to love these old names. I dare say many of these star names are 4,000 years old. Shepherds and sailors were the first astronomers. The sailors had to steer by the stars, and the shepherds could lie on the ground and enjoy them without having to twist their necks. They saw and named Alcor, thousands of years before telescopes were invented, and long before there were any books to help them. They saw the demon star, too, which I have never seen. It needs patience to see those things; sharp eyes are nothing to be proud of, because they are given to us. But patience is something to be eager about, because it costs us a lot of trouble to get it.
Let's try for it. We've had a test of sight. Now let's have a test of patience. It takes more patience than sharpness of sight to trace the outline of the Little Dipper. It has seven stars, too, and the Pole star is in the end of the handle. Do you see two rather bright stars about twenty-five degrees from the Pole? I hope so, for they are the only brightish stars anywhere near Polaris. Well, those two stars are in the outer rim of the Little Dipper. Now, I think you can trace it all; but to make sure you see the real thing, I will tell you the last secret. The handle of the Big Dipper is bent back; the handle of the Little Dipper is bent in.
Now, if you have done all this faithfully, you have worked hard enough, and I will reward you with a story. Once upon a time there was a princess named Callisto, and the great god Jupiter fell in love with her. Naturally, Jupiter's wife, Juno, wasn't pleased, so she changed the princess into a bear. But before this happened, Callisto became the mother of a little boy named Arcas, who grew up to be a mighty hunter. One day he saw a bear and he was going to kill it, not knowing that the bear was really his own mother. Luckily Jupiter interfered and saved their lives. He changed Arcas into a bear and put both bears into the sky. Callisto is the Big Bear, and Arcas is the Little Bear. But Juno was angry at that, and so she went to the wife of the Ocean and said, "Please, never let these bears come to your home." So the wife of the Ocean said, "I will never let them sink beneath the waves." And that is why the Big and the Little Dipper never set. They always whirl around the Pole star. And that is why you can always see them, though some nights you would have to sit up very late.
Is that a true story? No. But, I can tell you a true one that is even more wonderful. Once upon a time, before the bear story was invented and before people had tin dippers, they used to think of the Little Dipper as a little dog. And so they gave a funny name to the Pole star. They called it Cynosura, which means "the dog's tail." We sometimes say of a great man, "he was the cynosure of all eyes," meaning that everybody looked at him. But the original cynosure was and is the Pole star, because all the stars in the sky seem to revolve around it. The two Dippers chase round it once every twenty-four hours, as you can convince yourself some night when you stay up late. So that's all for to-night.
What! You want another true story? Well, just one more. Once upon a time the Big Dipper was a perfect cross. That was about 50,000 years ago. Fifty thousand years from now the Big Dipper will look like a steamer chair. How do I know that? Because, the two stars at opposite ends of the Dipper are going in a direction different from the other five stars. How do I know that? Why, I don't know it. I just believe it. There are lots of things I don't know, and I'm not afraid to say so. I hope you will learn how to say "I don't know." It's infinitely better than guessing; it saves trouble, and people like you better, because they see you are honest. I don't know how the stars in the Big Dipper are moving, but the men who look through telescopes and study mathematics say the end stars do move in a direction opposite to the others, and they say the Dipper must have looked like a cross, and will look like a dipper long, long after we are dead. And I believe them.
CONSTELLATIONS YOU CAN ALWAYS SEE
There are forty-eight well known constellations, but of these only about a dozen are easy to know. I think a dozen is quite enough for children to learn. And therefore, I shall tell you how to find only the showiest and most interesting.
The best way to begin is to describe the ones that you can see almost every night in the year, because you may want to begin any month in the year, and you might be discouraged if I talked about things nobody could see in that month. There are five constellations you can nearly always see, and these are all near the Pole star.
Doubtless you think you know two of them already—the Big and the Little Dipper. Ah, I forgot to tell you that these dippers are not the real thing. They are merely parts of bigger constellations and their real names are Great Bear and Little Bear. The oldest names are the right ones. Thousands of years ago, when the Greeks named these groups of stars, they thought they looked like two bears. I can't see the resemblance.