Halloween in the heavens
Halloween has come a long way over hundreds and hundreds of years. It all started in Celtic Britain, present-day Ireland, and other European countries. 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, 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 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 Thursday night. At the same time, there's a lot of great eye candy in the night skies this Halloween.
I want to show you some tricks for finding great treats in the Butler sky. You may want to pull out the entire October star map from the Starwatch column earlier this month to help you or download it from my website at lynchandthestars.com. We don't have a full moon this Halloween. As much as it adds to the ambience of trick-or-treating and other Halloween traditions, it does make spotting the celestial treats a little trickier.
We still have a ghostly comet in the early evening Western sky. It’s Tsuchinshan-ATLAS, and while it’s not nearly as bright as earlier this month, you can still see it with the naked eye in the early evening Western sky. It’s best to use a stargazing app like Sky Guide to help you pinpoint it. Tsuchinshan-ATLAS is looking at Earth in the rearview mirror, over 78 million miles away.
Unfortunately, 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 easy to see.
As evening darkness sets in, you'll see Arcturus beaming away just above the low west-northwest horizon. Astronomically, 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 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. It looks like a tiny Big or Little Dipper with just your naked eye.
Most people who exercise an intense stare-down with the Pleiades can see six to seven stars in that close mix. Through binoculars or a telescope, you’ll see many, many more.
The Pleiades is a family of relatively young stars about 410 light-years away, born together from a massive 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 when 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. All of the stars 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 love that image!
Happy Halloween!
Mike Lynch is an amateur astronomer and retired broadcast meteorologist for WCCO Radio in Minneapolis/St. Paul. He is the author of “Stars: a Month by Month Tour of the Constellations,” published by Adventure Publications and available at bookstores and adventurepublications.net. Contact him at mikewlynch@comcast.net.
