Pleiades' "half sister" cluster
Saturday, December 10, 2005
Looking East-Southeast at Nightfall
Tonight, look for the Hyades star cluster -- not just a pattern on
our sky's dome -- but an actual, gravitationally bound cluster of
stars in space. You can find it in the eastern horizon, south of
the bright red planet Mars, now high in the southeast at nightfall.
To the eye, the Hyades appears to be shaped like the letter V
(you'd see many more stars if you looked through binoculars or a
telescope). On the sky's dome, this V represents the face of Taurus
the Bull. In the lore of the sky, the Hyades are half-sisters to
another cluster of stars, also in the constellation Taurus -- the
Pleiades star cluster. For more about the Pleiades, see our chart
for December 8th. Notice the reddish star Aldebaran, which appears
to be a part of the V-shaped Hyades cluster. Aldebaran, one of the
brightest stars in our sky, represents the Bull's fiery red eye.
But at about 60 light-years away, Aldebaran is only about half the
distance to the Hyades star cluster in space, and so not a true
part of the Hyades cluster.
