Starry Nights and Fairy Tales

What are constellations? They are group of stars as we can see from earth giving us all the opportunity to run our imagination wild. One of the very few fond memories I have about my undergrad life is lying on the terrace of our hostel and gazing at the stars. One of my friends had a book written about stars and planets one can watch in the night sky. For a while we had this great hobby of identifying the constellation described in that book. That is how I first got familiar with Orion, Canis Major, Canis Minor, Leo, Scorpius….. and many other great constellations in our night sky.

How constellations are formed? Are the stars in constellations connected? Are they same distance from earth? Some obvious questions I had at that time. Unfortunately Internet was not accessible to us. Honestly, I do not even remember about hearing about Internet till 1998. These questions were all forgotten and I never got a chance to think about them until few days back when AK and me went to our local, tiny planetarium for a show about night sky of the month. After that the local amateur astronomers invited us for sky watching. They had some powerful portable telescope.  I was looking specifically for Cygnus. It was the first time I was looking at it as swan. We used to call it as Northern Cross.

This brings me to the point. These names are obviously figment of human imagination. Sky we see is tiny visible part of the infinitely large cosmos. Everything we see with naked eye is within our galaxy: ‘Milky Way’ (that was what I thought until I went to planetarium the other day, apparently if you look carefully to the Andromeda constellation on a night without contaminated from city lights you can see Andromeda Galaxy as a smudge). Anyhow, I got answers to some of the above questions: The stars in the constellations are not connected any way. They are there at different distance from earth.  The flat nature of sky as we see it give us an opportunity to see them as dots on black canvas.

I know it is not news to most of you. Volumes are written on the role of this constellation in an individual’s destiny. How can we know if any of these stars are even there right now? We see a mostly outdated picture these stars when when we look up the sky today. All of them are several light years away.  Betelgeuse, the brightest star in Orion constellation is 640 light years away. It will take another 640 years before we know how the star looks at this moment, in normal scenario. Even if it  ceases to exist at this moment, we will still see it as if it is there for the next six and something centuries. But some of us believe that it can influence our future without even knowing its own present! Our destiny is in the stars. I completely agree, but not in the ‘astrological’ way, for sure.