There's no getting around the fact that most constellations don't look like what they're supposed to be. Not only do you have to use your imagination, but you need to put it into four-wheel drive. Cultures that go way back to ancient times used constellations to depict characters in their stories or mythology. They didn't really care all that much if the constellations resembled the cast members in their celestial sagas or not. These dramas would be played out in the heavens night after night and year after year in their much darker night skies, free of light pollution from shopping malls and such. It was their reality TV, without Ryan Seacrest and Simon Cowell.
The great thing about constellations is that they pretty much keep their same shapes over the ages. Because of the Earth's rotation on its axis and its orbit around the sun, the constellations move across the sky generally to the west through the course of the night, and also migrate slowly westward from night to night through the course of the year. The individual stars that make up the constellations, however, have barely budged relative to each other in thousands of years. That has allowed the constellations to stay the same for centuries and the stories based on them to be passed down through the generations. In fact, we see virtually the same constellations the ancients saw, of course without all the light pollution.
The constellation names and stories vary, of course, with the many different cultures though the ages. The ones most of the western hemisphere are familiar with originate from Greek and Roman mythology. I call them soap operas in the skies, involving gods and goddesses and their dealings and misdealings with mortals. I love telling these stories in my Starwatch columns and at my star parties. If you've ever done any research on constellation stories from any culture, you'll find many different versions of the same story. That makes perfect sense since these stories have been passed down through time mostly by word of mouth, and you know how stories can be manipulated when that happens.
Even though we have a full moon partially washing the dimmer details, there's still quite a story being carried out in the early evening southern sky right now. It involves the bright constellation Orion and some of his bright surrounding constellations, what I like to call Orion and his gang. These are some of the brightest constellations you can see in the night sky around here. Orion the Hunter is at the center of this celestial saga.
The constellation honestly looks more like an hourglass than a hunter, but nonetheless, that hourglass outlines the torso of the heavenly hunter. Orion's calling card is the three bright stars in a row that depict his belt. Use the belt stars as a pointer to help you find the neighbor constellation Taurus the Bull to the upper right of Orion.
Taurus is a smaller constellation that resembles a little arrow pointing to the lower right. That allegedly outlines the snout of Taurus the Bull. One of the stars to the lower right of the arrow is much brighter than the rest. That's Aldebaran, the brightest star in Taurus.
Just above the arrow that makes up the face of Taurus the Bull is a super bright star that has nothing to do with this story, because most of the time it's nowhere near Taurus. It's the bright planet Jupiter that this winter happens to find itself in that part of the night sky as it migrates among the stars in its 12-year cycle. Jupiter is a great target for a small telescope or even a good pair of binoculars because you can see up to four of its brightest moons as they orbit around the biggest planet in our solar system. You may also see some of Jupiter's cloud bands around the 88,000 mile-wide world.
Just above the arrow of Taurus's face and Jupiter is the bright star cluster called the Pleiades. Even in lit-up urban skies, you can see that it resembles a tiny little dipper. It has nothing in common, however, with the much bigger actual constellation Ursa Minor, otherwise known as the Little Dipper. Most people see six to seven stars in the Pleiades, but with binoculars, you can see many more. Astronomically, it's a group of young stars born together about 100 million years ago. The Pleiades star cluster is also known as the Seven Little Sisters, and that's where our story begins.
The Seven Little Sisters were the daughters of Atlas, the deposed king of the gods who was banished by Zeus, the new king of the Greek gods. In his banishment, he's forced to hold up the entire world on his shoulders. His seven daughters stuck together after what happened to their poor father and are said to be still weeping for him.
These very attractive young women caught the eye of Orion, a real macho man who lived the life of a hermit hunter and had a real eye for ladies, especially the ones with divine backgrounds. He very much wanted to get to know all of them better, and I'm not just talking dinner and a movie.
Zeus, who you know is a bad dude if you've read any Greek mythology, had a soft spot in his heart for Atlas's daughters and wanted to spare them from Orion's not-so-honorable advances. Zeus whipped up a small but mighty celestial bull he called Taurus and placed him between Orion and the seven lovely ladies. This bull was more solid than a brick house, so not even the mighty hunter Orion was going to get by it; not even with the help of his hunting dogs, Canis Major and Canis Minor, represented as constellations to the left and lower left of Orion. To this night, the great celestial standoff continues. Nothing gets past Taurus.
(Lynch is an amateur astronomer and author of the book, "Stars, a Month by Month Tour of the Constellations." Contact him at mikewlynch@comcast.net.)