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Halloween heavens

Halloween has come a long way over hundreds and hundreds of years. It all got started in Celtic Britain, present day Ireland, and other places around Europe. It was believed that the separation between the realms of the living and dead became much thinner as summer evolved into autumn. People believed that the spirits of the deceased, or ghosts, and other creatures from across the threshold of death occasionally popped into our realm to remind us of our fate. In some cases they even came back to settle scores and get even with someone from their previous mortal life. Whatever the reason, people were frightened and basically partied and celebrated as a way to scare the ghosts and their companions away.

Nowadays there isn’t all that fear, but there’s still a lot of celebrating! Terrestrial ghosts, goblins, and other costumed characters will roam the streets and knock on your door in search of candy on Tuesday night. At the same time there’s a lot of great eye candy in the Marshall night skies this Halloween.

I want to show you some tricks to find some of the great treats in the sky. You may want to pull out the full October star map from the Starwatch column earlier this month to help you out, or download it from my website at lynchandthestars.com. We don’t quite have a full moon, but it’s close to that. As much as it adds to the ambiance of trick or treating and other Halloween traditions, it does make it a little trickier to spot the celestial treats.

There’s no great pumpkin in the night sky, but there is a very bright star with a distinctly orange-red glow. It’s the bright star Arcturus, which is actually the brightest star in the early evening sky this time of year. It’s so easy to see. As evening darkness sets in you’ll see Arcturus beaming away just above the low west-northwest horizon. Astronomically the great pumpkin star Arcturus is considered to be a bloated red giant star near the end of its life. Within a billion years or so it will gravitationally shrivel down to a white dwarf star. Arcturus is haunting us from a distance of 214 trillion miles!

The marquee Halloween celestial treat in the evening sky right now is the Pleiades star cluster, otherwise known as the Seven Little Sisters. You should have no problem finding it, even with light pollution. Look in the eastern sky early in the evening and you shouldn’t have much trouble finding it. With just your naked eye it looks like a tiny Big or Little Dipper. Most people in a good intense stare down with the Pleiades can see six to seven individual stars in that close mix. Through binoculars or a telescope you’ll see many, many more.

The Pleiades is literally a family of relatively young stars about 410 light-years away that were born together out of a huge cloud of hydrogen gas. Not all that long ago many older cultures feared the appearance of the Pleiades as an omen of oncoming catastrophes. It was believed that when the Pleiades reached its highest point in the sky, a little after midnight on Halloween, at least some mayhem would break out! The folk back in the day, or night, didn’t believe there would be a calamity every Halloween at midnight, but if one were in the works, that would be around the time it hits! Be careful when the Seven Little Sisters get on a late night Halloween high point this week!

There’s normally an extended ghostly image around Halloween, better known as the Milky Way band, but you really need to be in the darker and spookier countryside to see it. Unfortunately this week the nearly-full to full moon will whitewash the sky so much that the band will be very difficult to see even if you’re in the boonies. If you can extend your celestial Halloween celebration into next week it will be a whole lot better with the bright moon out of the early evening sky.

All of the stars that we see in the sky at any time are part of our Milky Way galaxy, but in the dark country skies you’ll see that ghostly band of light running roughly from the northern horizon, through the zenith, onto the southern horizon. This band is composed of the combined light of the billions of stars that make up the plane of the 100,000 light-year diameter disk-shaped spiral of stars we call our home galaxy.

One of the great pieces of Halloween-like lore concerning the Milky Way band comes from Native American tribes. They firmly believed the band to be the collective light of the campfires of souls taking a break for the night on their way to heaven. I just love that image!

Happy Halloween!

Mike Lynch is an amateur astronomer and professional broadcast meteorologist for WCCO Radio in Minneapolis/St. Paul and is author of the book, “Stars: a Month by Month Tour of the Constellations,” published by Adventure Publications available at bookstores at http://www.adventurepublications.net.

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