Page:The Music of the Spheres.djvu/224

 of the Argonauts. Canopus ranks next to Sirius in brightness. The bright stars of Orion and the Scorpion are each in their season seen high in the sky. Thus the appearance of the heavens would seem quite strange to one who had come from the north.

The Magellanic Clouds, which are almost as famous as the Southern Cross, lie to one side of the Milky Way, as seen by persons south of the equator, but they have no apparent connection with our Galaxy of stars. The "clouds" resemble the Milky Way and are easily discernible with the unaided eye, the larger one being 200 times the apparent size of the moon—about as large as the bowl of the Big Dipper—and the smaller one-fourth as large.

Photographs reveal the large Magellanic Cloud as being composed of nebulæ, individual stars and star clusters, the stars ranging from the fifth to the fifteenth magnitude. Flammarion counted 291 distinct nebulæ, 46 clusters and 582 stars. Herschel counted several hundred nebulæ and clusters "which far exceeds anything that is to be met with in any other region of the heavens." , director of the Harvard Observatory, found the linear diameter of the cloud to be 15,000 light years, and that it lay at such an immense distance that it required 110,000 years for its light to reach us. This cloud is like a small universe in itself, although many of its stars are anything but small for Dr. Shapley found that hundreds of them exceed the brightness of the sun by 10,000 times.

The large Magellanic Cloud lies between the southern pole and Canopus; the smaller one between Beta Centauri and the pole. These starry clouds, which look so much like real clouds, were named after the celebrated navigator, Magellan.