No mist and mystery to enliven the walk tonight, just a rather large number of nice
shiny stars.
I’m taking a bit of an interest in the stars lately. So far I’ve
got pretty clued up on recognising Venus and Jupiter, which is a start I
suppose. And I now know where the constellation of Taurus is, although I have to say that it requires a bit of a stretching of the
imagination to see any picture of a bull. Mine doesn’t quite stretch that
far, which is a source of endless shame.
What I keep getting drawn to at the moment is that little
cluster of diddy stars up in the top right corner. They’re the Pleiades,
apparently, and I’ve been reading up on them. The three most notable facts are:
1) They contain a number of brown dwarfs. Why they’re not
dwarves, I don’t know, but apparently they’re not. And I also don’t yet know
what the difference is between a brown dwarf, a black dwarf, a red dwarf, and a
tortoiseshell dwarf, but I assume I will eventually. I expect the brown dwarves
(sorry, dwarfs) are the most boring ones who have a regular job in the mines
and talk about football all day.
2) Nobody knows how far away they are. Several leading astronomers have calculated
the distance, but they’ve all come up with different answers. This has, I
gather, become something of an issue with leading astronomers and resulted in
much huffing, puffing, and saying ‘ooh, get her!’ a lot.
3) I need to make the most of my sightings of the Pleiades
(or the Seven Sisters as they’re also known) because they’re only expected to
last another 250 million years.
No doubt my education will continue for as long as I remain
domiciled in The Shire. This will obviously be rather less than 250 million
years, and might be sooner than you think if a certain person doesn’t stop driving
me mad by throwing a soggy blanket over the magic to be found here. Magic is
hard to find, and I get very stressed when people who make a virtue of
ordinariness crush it out of sheer ignorance.
No comments:
Post a Comment