Page:St. Nicholas, vol. 40.1 (1912-1913).djvu/537

1913.]

can easily find this group of stars in the sky if you face the south, turn a little toward the east, and then look up. You will see first a V-shaped figure with a bright reddish star at one end of the V. This is called, and is imagined to be the eye of the Bull. The two left-hand stars joined to the V in the map are the tips of his horns.

The group of stars close together on the right is called the. Six stars can easily be seen in this group, but, on a very clear night, four more can be seen if you have good eyesight. Directly underneath the Pleiades. To the eye, this appears like a star, but viewed with a telescope, it will show a round globe surrounded by a ring seen somewhat aslant.—, Professor of Astronomy,, Poughkeepsie, N. Y.

“ drawing shows the planet Saturn, which is in the constellation —the Bull—as a bright yellowish star, between the  and the Pleiades.

“Saturn is a great globe some 76,000 miles in diameter, and encircled by thin, broad rings 170,000 miles in diameter. Many considerations tell us that these rings are made up of myriads of bodies so minute and so distant that they cannot be seen individually with any telescope.

“The planet and rings shine by reflecting the light of the sun to us. Though they form immense circles, the rings arc never opened wider than shown in the drawing, which closely represents the appearance of the planet at the present time. Every fifteen years these rings are presented to us on edge, and they are then too thin to be seen from the earth, and the planet appears for a day or two shorn of its beautiful appendages. This occurred last in.

“The distance of Saturn from us on, will be 841,000,000 miles.

“As will be seen by the photograph, the principle stars of the Pleiades are involved in dense gaseous matter, called, which fills the entire cluster with wispy, shredded patches and masses of light.

“The entire cluster is slowly drifting across the sky toward the south and east. We say slowly, because it takes some years of careful observation to detect this movement, but the real motion must be at least many miles a second.”—, Astronomer of the Yerkes Observatory, University of Chicago.