CONSTELLATIONS

The stars are bright tonight. I walked the long way home from the bus so that I could see them, and at least try to remember those winter constellations.

There was Orion, the hunter. You could see his sword, his belt, even the tip of his arrow! I watched him slip behind the trees by the allotments.

Above him, Pegasus the Parallelogram (I’ve never been able to see the flying horse).

Then there was Cassiopeia, upside down in her W-shaped throne. She’d fall out like that; bit embarrassing. Below her, the brilliant North Star, and there, curiously round the wrong way this evening, was the Plough.

You might know the Plough as the ‘Big Dipper’. If it were up to me I’d have called it the Saucepan, and invented some story about how Prometheus burned himself campfire-cooking one day and flung his pan of beans into the heavens in frustration.

Anyway. It’s not up to me. The Plough it is.

Only, tonight, with its stars rotated, it was looking almost exactly like a gigantic question mark. There’s a lot more mythos I could attach to that!

The Question Mark - mystery of the universe, why, what, for whom? And how?

But of course, question marks were invented after ploughs. And true, in the summer, when sensible people were out in the fields stargazing, the Plough would have been in its familiar ‘saucepan’ configuration.

I looked it up. The stars that make up the Question Mark have the loveliest sounding names - Alioth, Dubhe, Merak, Megrez, Mizar. Some are ancient, blue, and burning the last remains of their hydrogen. Some are much like our own Sun on the main H-R Sequence, and quite a few are really double stars that look like they’re only one. Whatever, the light we’re seeing from all those different stars is already a century old. The Question Mark, is still full of mystery.

I got cold in the end. And a bit of neck ache, so I plumped for home. It’s nice to look up and see the stars every now and again though, isn’t it?