It’s 6:30 in the morning on a Saturday, far too early to be awake if you don’t have to go to work or milk cows or whatever, but I’ve been up to look at Matariki.
it’s a beautiful clear crisp morning. The original plan was to see it with a telescope, but even the ten minutes it would have taken to set up my old Dobsonian 10 inch light bucket just seemed too much of an effort, and really binoculars are sometimes better for these bigger constellations. I say bigger, but you can still cover it with your thumb at arms length.
I listened to a very interesting interview on the radio the other night with an ethno-astronomer, who has just published a book on the stories told about this constellation by various populations around the world. The tales are remarkably similar – seven sisters being chased by a man who has fallen in love with them – Orion, the hunter. It was fascinating. The theory goes that this fable could be the oldest of mankind, dating back to our origins. The last time we were all together, in Africa, being one hundred thousand years ago.
Many of them even have an explanation for why they are called the seven sisters, even though only six are visible to most people with the naked these days. It will be something like one of them being very shy and hiding. Presumably then there has to be an astronomical explanation for why we can no longer see seven. One of them might have just become dimmer, or blown up, as part of their life cycles; or maybe in their movements relative to us, two are now so close together that they are indistinguishable. I remember in the past learning that the number of stars you could see was a test of eyesight, with some people able to see up to nine. I must confess, Matariki just looks like a smudge in the sky to me without the binoculars. This is probably partly due to light and air pollution, even up here in the wilds of Waikanae, but mostly my aging and myopic eyes.