Any Aroostook County Christmas celebration stands incomplete without a compelling need to look up, weather permitting, and gaze! The brightest and most beautifully brilliant constellations seek to enter your eye gate dancing along with your merry moments.
As inhabitants of this small, fragile planet, we must choose to enlarge our Christmas context by affirming that transparent life affirming atmospheric membrane and the reality of our spinning, orbiting, ornamental, hall-decking place in the solar system. The Winter sky not only provides a cap to enlighten and lift our terrestrial point of view but also serves as a welcome and fabulous window to keep us as Emerson once wrote, “in the perpetual presence of the sublime.”
Gaze at mighty Orion, king of constellations. The conspicuous and unforgettable box like outline includes the well lauded “belt” of Orion — that stubby line of three jeweled stars from which hangs the fuzzy sword star, Theta Orionis, location of the “Great Nebula” of Orion, arguably the most breathtaking of stellar nurseries whose manifold wreaths of illuminated gas and dust sparkle in the telescopic eyepiece. Orion’s body includes ruddy colored Betelguese, a mighty supergiant star and royal Rigel, a blue white star of penetrating brilliance.
Gaze at splendid Sirius, bursting with scintillating blue beams low in southeastern skies. Simply trace a line downward from Orion’s belt to find the legendary “Dog Star.” Alpha Canis Majoris casts its radiance only eight light years distance, and thus serves as one of Earth’s closest stellar luminaries. Invisible save from the eyes of penetrating telescopes rests a faint white dwarf companion known as Sirius B, or the “Pup.”
Gaze with pure pleasure at the Pleiades, nestled upon the back of red giant star Aldebaran and the outline of Taurus the Bull. The famous “seven sisters” star cluster inspires wonder and curiosity to even the most casual star student. Aldebaran hosts the Hyades star cluster within its boundaries. All deserve your attention, especially through binoculars and light optical aid.
Gaze at Gemini, hooked close to Orion’s border. Two bright stars, just finger-widths apart, became known as Castor and Pollux, twin brothers whose loving loyalty stand as a timely reminder of letting love shine through the windows of our heart for in the final analysis, all our neighbors remain our brothers and sisters.
Gaze at giant, jolly Jupiter who reigns with gobs of great golden light near the regal head of Leo in low eastern skies as we enter this solstice season. Our largest solar system neighbor will resume a rightly place among the star points of our sustained winter world.
And the Christmas-time stars would insist our recognition low in northwestern skies of the cross-shaped stars of Cygnus the Swan settling down to the horizon in unmistakably configuration. The Swan along with Lyra, the Harp, and Aquila, the Eagle, combine to expose the “Summer Triangle” a massive three-sided sky figure dominating low west, north-western horizon as 2014 yields to a new year.
As my mind and body age, wrinkle, and decay, I can still see the worthiness of staring upward and surrendering to those same stars I knew as a boy. The silent nights of winter, thou bleak and blowing air drums, purge those more mundane and often cruel necessities which stitch our lives into worldly significance.
Let’s neither neglect our best friends nor our best skies this holiday season. Or to paraphrase John Donne, “Ask not for whom the sky shines; it shines for thee.”
Larry Berz of Caribou is director of Easton’s Francis Malcolm Planetarium and astronomy instructor at the Maine School of Science and Mathematics.
