Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 47.djvu/802

784 could not have been very extensive or very carefully conducted, for there are many double stars much wider than γ Arietis which Hooke could certainly have separated if he had examined them. The magnitudes of the components of γ are four and four and a half, or, according to Hall, both four; distance 8·5″, p. 180°. A few degrees above γ, passing by β, is a wide double λ, magnitudes five and eight, distance 37″, p. 45°, colors white and lilac or violet. Three stars are to be seen in 14: magnitudes five and a half, ten, and nine, distances 83″, p. 36°, and 106″, p. 278°, colors white, blue, and lilac. The star 30 is a very pretty double, magnitudes six and seven, distance 38·6″, p. 273°. Σ 289 consists of a topaz star combined with a sapphire, magnitudes six and nine, distance 28·5″, p. 0°. The fourth-magnitude star 41 has several faint companions. The magnitudes of two of these are eleven and nine, distances 34″, p. 203°, and 130″, p. 230°. We discover another triple in π, magnitudes five, eight, and eleven, distances 3·24″, p. 122°, and 25″, p. 110°. The double mentioned above as being too close for our three-inch glass is ε, which, however, can be divided with the four-inch, although the five-inch will serve us better. The magnitudes are five and a half and six, distance 1·26″, p. 202°. The star 52 has two companions, one of which is so close that our instruments can not separate it, while the other is too faint to be visible in the light of its brilliant neighbor without the aid of a very powerful telescope.

We are now about to enter one of the most magnificent regions in the sky, which is hardly less attractive to the naked eye than Orion, and which men must have admired from the beginning of their history on the earth, the constellation Taurus (map No. 23). Two groups of stars especially distinguish Taurus, the Hyades and the Pleiades, and both are exceedingly interesting when viewed with the lowest magnifying powers of our telescopes.

We shall begin with a little star just west of the Pleiades, Σ 412, also called 7 Tauri. This is a triple, but we can only see it as a double, the third star being exceedingly close to the primary. The magnitudes are six and a half, seven, and ten, distances 0·3″, p. 216°, and 22″, p. 62°. In the Pleiades we naturally turn to the brightest star η, or Alcyone, famous for having once been regarded as the central sun around which our sun and a multitude of other luminaries were supposed to revolve, and picturesque on account of the little triangle of small stars near it which the least telescopic assistance enables us to see. One may derive much pleasure from a study of the various groupings of stars in the Pleiades. Photography has demonstrated, what had long been suspected from occasional glimpses revealed by the telescope, that this celebrated cluster of stars is intermingled with curious forms of nebulæ. The nebulous matter appears in festoons, apparently