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Lake County Skies: Superman rules the June nights
LAKE COUNTY, Calif. – When you look up into Lake County's beautiful dark skies this month, be on the lookout for a number of constellations with fascinating roots in ancient mythology.
The June night skies continue to be dominated by Bootes, whom we discussed in last month’s column.
To the east of Bootes is the comparatively faint constellation Hercules. The graphic below shows the outline of the constellation and an image of Hercules.
Hercules is named for the superman of Greek mythology. He was the son of Zeus, king of the Greek gods. He possessed tremendous strength.
In true soap opera fashion, Hercules got into a bit of trouble, and had to redeem himself by performing 12 labors.
One of those tasks was to get rid of Leo the Lion, who was terrorizing the Peloponnesian villages. Recall our reference to Leo in our April column.
In the artist’s rendition in the figure below, he is battling the hydra, another of his labors.
In spite of his strength and accomplishments, the constellation Hercules has no bright stars, and is not easy to locate.
Hercules contains two remarkable telescope objects, M13 and M92. No, these are not named after military hardware. They are designations in the Messier Catalog of Deep Sky Objects.
Messier was a French astronomer who lived in the 1700s. He cataloged more than 100 objects, giving them such imaginative names as M1, M2 and so on.
M13 is known as The Great Cluster in Hercules. A picture of it can be seen below. It contains approximately 1 million stars that are relatively close together. M92 is similar, but smaller.
Through even a small telescope M13 is a beautiful object. It looks like a fuzzy ball, but if you look slightly away from it – an observing technique known as averted vision which make faint objects look brighter – you will see tiny stars around the outer edge.
Immediately to the west of Hercules is Corona Borealis, the Northern Crown. In Greek mythology, this represents the crown given to Ariadne, the daughter of the king of Crete, for her wedding.
Finally, if you look to the north of Hercules and Corona Borealis, a large but faint constellation can be visible under dark skies – Draco the Dragon. The word “Draco” means dragon in Latin.
In 3000 BC, Draco held the North Star, which at the time was named Thuban. The location of the North Star changes slowly over time due to a bit of wobble when the Earth rotates on its axis.
Draco represents the 11th labor of Hercules, another beast he had to subdue.
The figure below shows an artist’s rendition of the dragon. Within Draco lies the Cat’s Eye Nebula. A nebula is a giant cloud of dust and gas. An image from the Hubble Space Telescope is shown alongside the image of Draco.
This concludes our tour of the June night skies, dominated by Hercules, the superman of Greek mythology.
John Zimmerman is a resident of Lake County, Calif., and has been an amateur astronomer for more than 50 years. For more information about astronomy and local resources, visit his Web site at www.lakecountyskies.com .