Page:The Music of the Spheres.djvu/95

 equator; his tail is even longer than his neck and curls upward as if he were angry—which he assuredly was when petrified by Perseus into stone. His sides are clear and black with unadorned sky-space and seem quite devoid of even the fainter stars.

Always look for Cetus in the southeast, south or southwest, in front of and below Orion and far below Andromeda. The point of the V-shaped Hyades also directs the eye toward his pentagonal head which extends toward the east.

Just about in the center of the long, giraffe-like neck of Cetus, the villain in our play, lies Myra, a most extraordinary star. This star is called "Myra, the Wonderful" because of its amazing behavior in a period of only eleven months. For three months Myra is visible to the unaided eye; during the other eight it can only be seen in a good telescope. Put in another way—for five months at a time it is completely invisible to the unaided eye; then from a mere speck it slowly brightens until in the course of three months more it has become a star of the 2nd magnitude, although it remains a star of the 2nd magnitude for only a few weeks. This change from a telescopic star of the 9th or 10th magnitude to one of the 2nd magnitude means that Myra must blaze up from 1000 times to 1500 times its ordinary brilliancy! Such a statement may overwhelm the casual reader but we must remember (in order not