To most southern hemisphere inhabitants, the constellation of Orion is better known as the Pot. Simply because it looks like a saucepan. Our brain is very good at creating recognisable patterns in the strangest places, you’ll know what I mean if you have ever spent any time looking up at clouds and spotting ones that suddenly look like dinosaurs, hearts or bunny rabbits. The night sky is the same, our brains naturally recognizes shapes like squares, triangles, diamonds, crosses and saucepans.
There are 88 recognised constellations in the sky all fitting neatly together. Some constellations are tiny, like the southern cross for example, others are huge like Orion or Pegasus. The stars that make up these shapes aren’t actually anywhere near each other, they just appear to us like this because this is how we see them from Earth. If we were to go to a different location in our Milky Way, the same stars would appear in different shapes.
Over the Summer in the Southern hemisphere, we see Orion over the entire summer season. It’s a handy marker in the sky to know its summer. Orion’s opposite constellation in the sky is Scorpius, New Zealand’s winter constellation. These two chase each other across the sky, and we never see them in the same part of the sky. When Orion is in the evening sky, Scorpius will be in the morning and vice versa.
Orion rises in the east in the spring and sets in the west in autumn. There are a few famous stars in Orion, Betelgeuse and Rigel are your brightest stars, the line of three that mark Orions belt and the beautiful M42 region; this is a nearby star forming region that is roughly 1500 light years away.
The three stars in the centre of Orion are in a line and very bright, blue Rigel is above these three and red Betelgeuse is below. If you can stay outside for 25 minutes so more, you will find that your eyes will become dark adjusted and you will be able to see many more stars and the colours will be more obvious.
Betelgeuse, the red twinkling star underneath the belt is a huge red supergiant star. It is massive, one of the largest stars in our visible sky and the 10th brightest in the whole sky.
Betelgeuse’s unusual name comes from Arabic, translated into ‘Armpit of the Giant’. To southern hemisphere observers, Orion is standing upside down on his head, his shoulders underneath his belt. His feet are at the top, marked by Rigel, the bright blue white star above the three belt stars. Rigel is also massive, and is approximately 870 light years away. So you are seeing Rigel as it looked 870 years ago, in the past. All the stars you see are in the past, isn’t that amazing?
So go outside, have a look around. Can you find this iconic constellation?
Becky Bateman runs the award winning stargazing business, Under The Stars.
