Page:The Music of the Spheres.djvu/99

 visiting Hero, his sweetheart. Prixus, coming safely to the end of his journey, dedicated the ram to Jupiter who placed it among the stars. It is now a zodiacal constellation with the horns of the ram for its sign: ♈︎. The golden fleece, while on earth, was of course very desirable so that it was fastened to an oak tree in the sacred grove of the War-god Mars at the eastern end of the Black Sea and a sleepless dragon was wound around the tree-trunk to protect it. It was to obtain this fleece that, in 936, Jason built a fifty-oared galley—the first of ships—and invited the heroes of Greece to go with him on the expedition. This adventurous undertaking was afterward known as the Argonautic Expedition. The ship Argo was placed in the sky as a southern constellation, or at least a part of it was for the bow is said to have been lost when passing through the Bosporus.

But even the portion that was lifted to the sky is so large that astronomers, for convenience, have divided it into three parts,—Carina, the Keel; Puppis, the Stern; and Vela, the Sail. The beautiful star Canopus lies on the Keel.

Triangulum and Aries, traveling beneath Andromeda, rise in late September and October and pass the meridian in the early evenings during the first weeks of December.