Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 30.djvu/776

752 the bursting of a sky-rocket." And Webb adds that there is an "elegant festoon near the center, starting with a reddish star."

No one can gaze upon this marvelous phenomenon, even with the comparatively low powers of an opera-glass, and reflect that all these swarming dots of light are really suns, without a stunning sense of the immensity of the material universe.

The Twins are just now entertaining a visitor whose presence may cause some perplexity to the beginner in star-lore. The planet Saturn, in his great thirty-year journey around the sun, is passing nearly through the center of this constellation. You will see the planet a little west of the star marked Delta (δ) in the map of Gemini, and making a conspicuous triangle with Castor and Pollux. It outshines both of those stars, but its golden light is more steady than theirs. Turn your glass upon it, and the difference in the aspect of a planet and that of a star will at once become apparent.

The map will enable you next to find Procyon, or the Little Dog-Star, more than twenty degrees south of Castor and Pollux, and almost directly below the Manger. This star will interest you by its golden-yellow color and its brightness, although it is far inferior in the latter respect to Sirius, or the Great Dog-Star, which you will see flashing splendidly far down beneath Procyon in the southwest. About four degrees northwest of Procyon is a third-magnitude star, called Gomelza, and the glass will show you two small stars which make a right-angled triangle with it, the nearer one being remarkable for its ruddy color.

Sirius, Orion, Aldebaran, and the Pleiades, all of which you will perceive in the west and southwest, are generally too much involved in the mists of the horizon to be seen to the best advantage at this season, although it will pay you to take a look through the glass at Sirius. But the beautiful star Capella, in the constellation Auriga, may claim a moment's attention. You will find it high up in the northwest, halfway between Orion and the pole-star, and to the right of the Twins. It has no rival near, and its creamy-white light makes it one of the most beautiful as well as one of the most brilliant stars in the heavens. Its constitution, as revealed by the spectroscope, resembles that of our sun, but the sun would make but a sorry figure if removed to the side of this giant star. About seven and a half degrees above Capella, and a little to the left, you will see a second-magnitude star called Menkalina. Two and half times as far to the left, or south, in the direction of Orion, is another star of equal brightness to Menkalina. This is El Nath, and marks the place where the foot of Auriga, or the Charioteer, rests upon the point of the horn of Taurus. Capella, Menkalina, and El Nath make a long triangle which covers the central part of Auriga. The naked eye shows two or three misty-looking spots within this triangle, one to the right of El Nath, one in the upper or eastern edge of the constellation, near a third-magnitude star called Theta, and another on a