Moon and Pleiades from midnight to dawn
Discuss Print Me Email to FriendTonight is Saturday, Aug 23 2008
The moon is a touch past last quarter phase as it and the Pleiades star cluster rise over your east-northeast horizon around midnight Saturday night. So it’ll be a fat waning crescent moon that follows the Pleiades upward during the wee morning hours Sunday morning. The two luminaries will shine rather high in the southeast as morning dawn starts to color the sky.
The Pleiades cluster is often called the Seven Sisters, though most people can only see six Pleiades stars with the unaided eye. These six little starlets create the tiny dipper-shaped formation that is well known the world over.
The Pleiades cluster consists of several hundred stars that were born from the same cloud of gas and dust over 100 million years ago. At more than 400 light-years distant, these Pleiades stars have to be quite luminous to be visible to the unaided eye. The brightest Pleiades star, Alcyone, is some 700 to 800 times brighter than our sun. If this star’s ultraviolet radiation (which the human eye can’t see) is included, that makes Alcyone a couple thousand times brighter.
The German astronomer Johann Madler (1794-1874) popularized the idea that Alcyone is the galaxy’s central sun, until a better understanding of galactic structure rendered this notion obsolete.
