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Spotting the Celestial Unicorn BY DENNIS MAMMANA Week of March 12-18, 2023 Have you ever been disappointed to search for a constellation figure in the heavens only to discover that it was utterly impossible? Trust me, you’re not alone! Take, for example, the flying steed known as Pegasus. I defy anyone to look skyward and outline its stars in such a way that they can see a flying horse. And, if you can, well, I’m afraid you’ll need more help than I can give you! No, constellations just aren’t real but are simply groups of randomly distributed stars that ancient storytellers created to represent objects, animals and people. Their combined stars appear nothing like their namesakes, at least not without plenty of imagination (or chemicals), so don’t feel bad that you can’t recognize them. One particularly unrecognizable star grouping lies in our evening sky right now. It’s known as Monoceros, the unicorn. Monoceros is composed of faint and obscure stars, and we often overlook it because it happens to lie among some of the most brilliant stars in all the heavens. With the moon out of the evening sky this week, you can search for it just to the east of dazzling Orion and between the bright stars Sirius and Procyon.
It’s tough to know where constellation stories and names originate. Often their roots are lost in antiquity, but we think that Monoceros may have a more modern origin. Some believe that it might have been the 16th-century Dutch theologian, cartographer and astronomer Petrus Plancius who invented this constellation, though some think it might have been named “Unicornu” by German astronomer Jacob Bartsch who published Plancius’ star maps in 1624. If you can identify Monoceros in a dark moonless sky (which is pretty much the only way it’s possible), you should also be able to see the faint wintertime Milky Way flowing gently southward through it. Once you find Monoceros, you’ll discover it takes quite an imagination to fashion a unicorn from its stars. But it’s not so much the constellation that’s interesting as what’s lurking within. Though they’re rather faint, quite a few celestial wonders are visible if you have a small telescope to aim in this direction. Monoceros is home to a beautiful triple star system -- three stars that orbit a common center of gravity -known as Beta Monocerotis. It was the famous astronomer William Herschel who discovered it in 1781, the same year he found the planet Uranus. Herschel found the three stars of Beta Mon to form a triangle that, from our distance
of about 700 light years, appears not to change over time, and he described it as one of the best triple star systems he’d ever seen. Also lying within the boundaries of Monoceros is the famous interstellar cloud named the Rosette Nebula that engulfs a star cluster known as NGC 2244. With a backyard telescope, one can sometimes make out some diffuse neb-
ulosity here, but it takes a pretty hefty scope to distinguish its ringed shape. Even if you don’t own a large enough telescope to show these celestial wonders, I hope you’ll at least seek out the unicorn. I suspect it’ll be the only one you ever see! Visit Dennis Mammana at dennismammana.com. COPYRIGHT 2023 CREATORS.COM
L O S T I N S U B U R B I A
I Ski, Therefore I Fall BY TRACY BECKERMAN I am not a terrible skier, but I am not a particularly good skier either. On the Official Learned-as-an-Adult Ski Scale, I fall somewhere between a 3-year-old on the bunny slopes and those beginner adults you see on the intermediate slopes with their arms flailing wildly and their faces frozen in an expression of sheer panic. Having skied for about 10 years now, I can usually manage to get down one of the lesser slopes without careening into either another skier or a tree. Therefore, I am at my best when there are neither other skiers nor trees in my path. And naturally, things can get a little dicey when I encounter both. Such was the case when I hit the slopes this past weekend. I hadn’t been skiing in a while and for some reason, I was under the delusion that my limited
ski skills had improved tenfold during my hiatus. Without a second thought, I hopped on the chairlift and skied over to one of the more advanced slopes. This was probably my first mistake. When I got to the top of the trail, I realized the slope was not only steeper than I was used to, but it was also narrower. It was also much busier than the easier slopes I usually skied. As expert skiers whizzed by me, I wondered if I might be better off feigning an injury so I could get a ride down in a stretcher before I got an actual injury skiing off a cliff. Unfortunately, as I stood there wondering if my will was up to date, I got caught up in a tide of teenage snowboarders who carried me over the edge of the slope. I managed to get about halfway down doing a combination of skiing and sliding and was actually beginning to believe I would make it down alive when all of a sudden, I came upon a
wall of skiers. Apparently, this group thought it would be fun to ski down the mountain with arms linked, side by side, like some kind of special skiing Rockettes. This may, in fact, have been fun for them, but it created a bit of problem for me since I was going much faster than they were and there was no place for me to pass them. Since I couldn’t go through them and I couldn’t go over them, I did the only thing I could do: I tried to go around them. The good news was that I managed not to hit any of the people in the ski wall. The bad news was that I hit a tree instead. Did I mention I’m not very good at stopping, either? I guess I should thank that tree for jumping out in front of me like that and helping me stop. However, I think it might have been a softer impact had I slammed into a person rather than a tree.
Somehow though, somewhat miraculously, I escaped from my tree altercation completely unscathed. As I plucked pine needles from my helmet and confirmed that I had no broken bones, I got back on the slope, which was now less steep and completely uncrowded, and skied down to the bottom. When I arrived at the base, I ran into a friend who was headed for the chairlifts. “Hey, is it a good ski day?” she asked me. “I don’t know,” I said, “But it’s a great day for careening into a tree.” Tracy Beckerman is the author of the Amazon Bestseller, “Barking at the Moon: A Story of Life, Love, and Kibble,” available on Amazon and Barnes and Noble online! You can visit her at www. tracybeckerman.com. COPYRIGHT 2023 CREATORS
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Friday, March 10, 2023 Discovery
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