Orion always comes up sideways. Throwing his leg up over the Dixmont mountains, he rises into the evening sky on his hands to supervise the winter sky. By about 8 p.m. this time of year, he is as high as he will get, and you can see his dog behind him with legs outstretched, a large bright star marking its shoulder.
The Dog Star, it is called, all known as Sirius, which is the Latin form of a Greek word that means “scorching.” Arab astronomers called it al-Shi‘ra, the same basic word, meaning “the shining one.”
These names make perfect sense. Sirius is the brightest star we see besides the sun. In fact, it is a double star system, with the large hot type A star, Sirius A, co-orbiting the white dwarf Sirius B, which is smaller than Earth.
They are too close together to distinguish without a telescope, so we see them as one star, the brightest in the constellation Canis Major, Big Dog. August gets the nickname “Dog Days” from Sirius because, as the ancient astronomers knew, it is rising invisibly in the sun’s glare at that hottest time of year.
Sirius is a strange star to look at because, on a clear black winter night, it seems to scintillate. Robert Burnham in his “Celestial Handbook” writes its actual color is white with a blue tinge. Ancient astronomers described it as red, which it is definitely not now.
When in the 1970s the British pop-astronomer Patrick Moore asked TV viewers to describe what color Sirius was on a particular night and time, more than 5,000 replied, with half saying it was bluish or bluish-white, about a quarter saying white, 14% saying it flashed all colors and others reporting greenish, yellowish or orange.
An artist’s impression shows the binary star system of Sirius A and its very small companion, Sirius B. Photo courtesy of NASA, ESA and G. Bacon (STScI)
On the surface, this might simply mean that stars are too far away to tell, anyway, so it is all in your mind’s eye. But this is not exactly true. Many stars show a definite color to the eye. Betelgeuse, in Orion’s shoulder, is distinctly red. Rigel, at Orion’s foot, is bluish.
Many winter nights, I have watched Sirius glint white, green and red, blue, yellow. It transcends what we call “twinkling,” which is a result not of star combustion but of light bending and splitting as it courses through the Earth’s unsteady air. Each one of the millions upon millions of stars that shines down on us has its own characteristics of light that develop in particular ways when they hit our eyes.
Sirius’s distinct star-character is shaped by its flashing. Whether I look at it through a telescope or glance up from the driveway, Sirius’ particular beauty ripples with a sort of inner tingle across my mind. Fleeting, but real.
Beauty is a real thing. Whatever brain chemicals the stars’ colors, locations and brightnesses stir up, the experience is real. It feels transcendent. The stars feel transcendent.
This starts to be reckless talk, scientifically speaking, because at some point, the beauty is no longer in the iris and cornea, but in the mind’s eye. In the eye of the beholder, like they say, and easy to dismiss as “subjective,” which in science is often code for not really real because it can’t be measured.
And yet, down through the eons, the stars have consistently provoked the same feelings: awe, vastness and depth. Even scientists, try as they might to partition off their feelings, are moved by starlight.
You might make fun of this way of seeing things, as if it is a meaningless distraction from the things you should have been doing by daylight. But if you pay attention to all the different glinting, your curiosity about our place among the infinities leads to strange findings.
Dana Wilde lives in Troy. You can contact him at naturalist1@dwildepress.net. His book “Winter: Notes and Numina from the Maine Woods” is available from North Country Press. Backyard Naturalist appears the second and fourth Thursdays each month.
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