Antares belongs to a showy constellation called the Scorpion. I cannot trace all the outline of a spider-like creature, but his poisonous tail or "stinger" is made by a curved line of stars south and east of Antares. And you can make a pretty fan by joining Antares to several stars in a curve which are west of Antares and a little north. There is an old tale that this Scorpion is the one that stung Orion to death when he began to "show off" and boast that there was no animal in the world that could kill him.
Another very bright star in the southern part of the sky is Spica. To find it, start with the handle of the Dipper, and making the same backward curve which helped you to find Arcturus, keep on till you come to the white star Spica—say thirty degrees beyond Arcturus. This is the brightest star in the constellation called "the Virgin." It is not worth while trying to trace her among nearly forty faint stars in this neighbourhood. But she is supposed to be a winged goddess who holds up in her right hand an ear of wheat, and that is what Spica means.
Now for an autumn constellation—the Southern Fish. I don't care if you fail to outline a fish, but I do want you to see the bright star that is supposed to be in the fish's mouth. And I don't want you to balk at its hard name—Fomalhaut (pronounced fo´-mal-o). It is worth a lot of trouble to know it as a friend. To find it, you have to draw an exceedingly long line two-thirds of the way across the whole sky. Start with the Pointers. Draw a line through them and the Pole star and keep clear on until you come to a solitary bright star rather low down in the south. That is Fomalhaut. It looks lonely and is lonely, even when you look at it through a telescope.
And now for the last story. Once upon a time the Persians thought there must be four stars that rule the lives of men. So they picked out one in the north and one in the south and one in the east and one in the west, just as if they were looking for four bright stars to mark the points of the compass. If you want to find them yourself without my help don't read the next sentence, but shut this book and go out and see. Then write down on a piece of paper the stars you have selected and compare them with the list I am about to give. Here are the four royal stars of the Persians: Fomalhaut for the north, Regulus for the south, Aldebaran for the east, and Antares for the west.
Why doesn't this list agree with yours? Because Persia is so far south of where we live. Ah, there are very few things that are absolutely true. Let's remember that and not be too sure: for everything depends upon the point of view! I hope you will see Fomalhaut before Christmas, before he disappears in the west. He is with us only five months and is always low—near the horizon. But the other seven months in the year he gladdens the children of South America and the rest of the southern hemisphere, for they see him sweeping high and lonely far up into their sky and down again.
But the loveliest of all the constellations described in this chapter is the Northern Crown. It is not a perfect crown—only about half a circle—but enough to suggest a complete ring. Look for it east of Arcturus. I can see seven or eight stars in the half-circle, one of which is brighter than all the others. That one is called "the Pearl." The whole constellation is only fifteen degrees long, but "fine things come in small packages"; and children grow to love the Northern Crown almost as much as they love the Pleiades.
THE TWENTY BRIGHTEST STARS
If you have seen everything I have described so far, you have reason to be happy. For now you know sixteen of the most famous constellations and fifteen of the twenty brightest stars. There are only twenty stars of the first magnitude. "Magnitude" ought to mean size, but it doesn't. It means brightness—or rather the apparent brightness—of the stars when seen by us. The word magnitude was used in the old days before telescopes, when people thought the brighter a star is the bigger it must be. Now we know that the nearer a star is to us the brighter it is, and the farther away the fainter. Some of the bright stars are comparatively near us, some are very far. Deneb and Canopus are so far away that it takes over three hundred years for their light to reach us. What whoppers they must be—many times as big as our sun.
Here is a full list of the twenty stars of the first magnitude arranged in the order of their brightness. You will find this table very useful.