Set Your Sights on Scorpion

The nighttime sky is full of many apparent groupings of stars that look and are named after mythical figures, animals, or inanimate objects. Some of the well-known groupings or constellations include Hercules, Pegasus, and Orion.

Right now Scorpius, the Scorpion, is now visible, low toward the southern horizon during the late evening hours. This constellation is one of the most striking and easily learned of all the summertime constellations visible from the United States. As you look for it, the upper stars of this star pattern form its body; its tail slants toward the horizon, then curves to the left and upward, and a fine stream of stars end in the wide pair that marks the Scorpion’s stinger.

One of the reasons why this constellation is so spectacular is that it is made up of as many as 15 moderately bright stars that form a distinctive constellation figure of a Scorpion. If you have binoculars, use them to sweep all through the region around Scorpius; you may see many beautiful sky objects such as double and multiple stars, as well as a variety of different star clusters.

The most dominant of these stars is the ruddy Antares, a familiar beacon in our early summer sky. Antares has an interesting history. The Ancients believed that Antares’ distinctive red color made this star look like the planet Mars. The very name “Antares” means “Rival of Ares,” Ares being the Greek name for the God of War. The Chinese in the time of Confucius called this star Ta Who, “the great fire.”

Antares is a gigantic reddish sun, measuring about 600 million miles in diameter (in contrast, our Sun is less than a million miles across). To give you a better comprehension of its overall size, if our Earth were the size of a baseball, Antares would be a globe measuring more than three and one-third miles across!

It would require about 9,000 of our suns to match the luminosity of this great star. Its light requires about 600 years to reach the Earth.