![]() ![]() Parisa wrote: “Lut Desert is one of the hottest and darkest areas on earth that stretches from the Alborz mountain range in the north to the ocean in the south in Eastern Iran. | Parisa Bajelan took this photo on November 17, 2017, from Iran and shared it with EarthSky. Bellatrix, a blue supergiant shining at magnitude 1.6, is the 22nd brightest star in the sky and 245 light-years away. The third brightest star of Orion, which marks his other shoulder, is Bellatrix. If we substituted Betelgeuse for our sun, it would swallow up all the inner planets. It’s a red supergiant 430 light-years away and a whopping 800 times larger than our sun. Betelgeuse is the 10th brightest star in the sky at magnitude 0.5. The second brightest star in Orion is reddish-orange Betelgeuse, which marks one shoulder. It’s a blue supergiant and 720 light-years distant. The star marking the other knee or foot of Orion is Saiph, a magnitude 2.1 star. Rigel is the seventh brightest star in the entire sky. Rigel is a blue supergiant 770 light-years away with a magnitude of 0.2. The brightest star in Orion is the bluish Rigel, which marks his western knee or foot. Orion the Hunter, as depicted in Urania’s Mirror, a set of constellation cards from around 1825. As Scorpius is about to rise in the east, Orion makes a hurried exit from the sky in the west. Mythology says that a scorpion killed Orion that’s why Orion is on one side of the sky while Scorpius the Scorpion is on the opposite side. (Not to be confused with Canes Venatici, a different constellation with the actual nickname of the Hunting Dogs.) On the other side of Orion are his hunting dogs, Canis Major and Canis Minor. Some stories have Orion pursuing the seven sisters of the Pleiades, which is a star cluster in the constellation Taurus. Yet there is no such story in the mythology of Orion. In many drawings of the constellation Orion, the Hunter looks to be battling his neighbor, Taurus the Bull. Order yours before they’re gone! Mythology of Orion the Hunter They show the moon phase for every day of the year. Orion’s shape is easy to pick out because of its many bright stars and signature Belt: three stars close together in a nearly straight line. Orion lies on the celestial equator, making it visible from both the Northern and Southern Hemispheres. Orion the Hunter is arguably the most recognizable constellation in the world. But if humans manage to stick around the Big Dipper will become first become something more like a small ladle-its main stars shallowing out over thousand of years-and if we make it to 98,000 CE, the Big Dipper starts to look more like a large kitchen knife.Orion the Hunter – visible to both hemispheres – rises in the east on December evenings. Even if you take a neolithic 30,000 BCE mammoth tusk as being our earliest star chart, the Big Dipper still looks a lot like the Big Dipper. The time spans involved resists most of our basic conceptions of civilization or human memory. ![]() The above GIF shows how the Big Dipper, perhaps the most recognizable constellation in the sky, has changed over the past 100,000 years and will change over the next 100,000. While even the oldest possible star chart we know of is over 32,000 years old, it still shows a constellation that looks remarkably like Orion.īut the basic fact is that the stars, much like our own planet and sun and everything else in universe, are constantly moving, even if that movement can take tens of thousands of years to become apparent. In the brief little blip of a human lifespan, the stars seem unchanging.
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