For tracking down spectacular giants, you can’t find a much better time than July. Any evening this month, look due south to see huge Constellation Scorpius, which will culminate 9 p.m.
July 20. Find the scorpion’s conspicuous heart star Antares, a red supergiant binary star system embedded at the center of its fishhook-shaped asterism. Originally the “heart of scorpion” in Mesopotamian astronomy, Antares was so-called by the ancient Greeks because its color rivals that of Ares (Mars).
Antares is a true giant. If we imagine it in the place of the sun in our home solar system, its tenuous and translucent surface would go beyond the Red Planet at its furthest position from the sun. It’s a variable star with a pulsating atmosphere, so it can reach out about as far out as Jupiter would be nearly 507 million miles (816 million km).
With a distance of 550 light years away, it’s hard to imagine what this really means while listening quietly in a summer field. Scorpius is composed of many naked eye stars. On the tail, Shaula and Lesath, the “Cat’s Eyes,” serve as the arachnid’s stinger.
The long sweep of stars to the west includes Acrab at the top and Fang at the bottom. The original claws of Scorpius, represented by stars Zubenelgenubi (southern claw) and Zubeneschamali (northern claw) in Babylonian astrotheology, are now the main stars of Constellation Libra and have been since the days of Julius Caesar. At first, it may seem that Scorpius has been deprived by t.
