The Story of The Seven Sisters

The myth and the truth known as The Seven Sisters

The Story of the Seven Sisters

There are several versions of the same myth. Depending on the research and your own personal preference the information actually remains pretty much the same. In a nutshell, the seven sisters were mortals whose parents were immortal...never a happy mix...and while they had their individual problems apparently one day they were out in the forest with their friend, Artemis, when along comes THE MIGHTY HUNTER! ORION! So here goes Orion, trying a few one line openers without success. Well really, what was Orion thinking? Artemis and all seven sisters were virgins and they were soooo NOT into boys! Their cold shoulder rebuke of his sexy self humiliated and bruised his giant ego so much that Orion just started to chase them through the forest.

What a jerk Orion was, as is, still, many of the other sex. This made Artemis so mad she decided she had to call in a favor from Zeus. Whatever made her think that was going to work out? The infamous saying "Be careful what you wish for, you just may get it" is a very old saying for a reason! Zeus helped the seven sisters all right...he turned them all into doves so they could fly away! Oh thanks a lot Great Zeus!

The seven doves flew so far into the heavens they became the stars known as the Pleiades. Poor Artemis was so upset to lose her friends that she put a bug in her brothers’ ear (that would be Apollo) to kill Orion by setting a trap for him with a monster Scorpion. That worked all right; Orion was killed, but here comes ole Zeus again and he puts Orion in the heavens right behind the Pleiades! So, the seven sisters arestill being harassed by the mighty hunter, Orion. Zeus, ever the comedian, has the constellation Scorpio placed behind Orion so he is still being harassed by the Thing that was the cause of his death! Orion is so egotistical he thinks this is a GOOD DEATH!

And through it all who do you think is laughing the hardest? You got that right, ole Zeus sits back and belly laughs so hard it causes landslides and Tsunamis all around the Mediterranean!

To give Zeus a little credit, since Artemis is the Goddess of the moon, she is allowed to visit her friends, the seven sisters, whenever the moon passes close to the Pleiades. Thank the gods for small favors, eh?

What were their names?

The seven sisters, daughters of Atlas and Pleione, were as follows and also where the myths begin to fold upon themselves;

Celæno means swarthy and of all the sisters she seems to have led a rather dull life or was exceptionally good at escaping the paparazzi as there is no information except that she had two children, both sons, by Prometheus. Her sons were named Lycus (wolf) and Chimærus (he-goat)

Electra, means amber, shinging or bright. Electra of course, well known for her adventures after her father, Agamemnon returned from the fall of troy and found his wife, Electra's mother, in bed with another man! Electra's mother and lover killed Agamemnon then Electra sought revenge for her father by killing her own mother. Sweet daughter's love?

Taygeta means long-necked. Apparently Zeus wanted Taygeta, she resisted, Zeus had his way anyway and Taygeta gave birth to Lacedæmon, founder of Sparta. This made Taygeta an important goddess but she suffered from post partum depression and hanged herself! Now, I ask you, if so then how could she have been in the forest with her other sisters and Artemis when Orion came through? Or is Taygeta then the one sister that cannot be easily seen?

Maia means grandmother, mother or nurse. Maia was the oldest of the seven sisters and she was also involved intimately with Zeus! No wonder Zeus solved Artemis problem the way he did! He wanted all seven sisters for himself! Maia, seduced by Zeus gave birth to Hermes, messenger of the gods.

Merope means eloquent, bee-eater and mortal. Merope married Sisyphus. Sisyphus made it known that Zeus raped Ægina. For his punishment Zeus has Sisyphus roll a boulder up a hill in Hades that never stays at the top of the hill, making Sisyphus redo his punishment for all eternity.

Asterope, means lightning, twinkling, sun-faced or stubborn-face. Another sister not intimately involved with Zeus, Asterope was seduced by the Sea King, Poseidon. Asterope gave birth to Oenomaus, king of Pisa.

Alcyone (or Halcyone) means queen who wards off evil storms. Alcyone was also seduced by Poseidon and gave birth to Hyrieus (also the name of Orion's father, but not the same Hyrieus) or Anthas, founder of Anthæa, Hyperea, and Halicarnassus

The truth about the constellation, Pleiades or Messier 45:

The star cluster known as the seven sisters is visible to us in the Northern Hemisphere in late fall and throughout the winter months. It is one of the closest star clusters to earth. That must be why there are so many different "origin" stories, legends, myths about this constellation. It has always been very visible in the night sky regardless of where you were on the earths surface. In the Southern Hemisphere the Pleiades is visible during late spring and all summer. It was formed just one hundred million years ago, just a baby compared to our sun, who is way past its fifth billionth birthday! Although the Pleiades resembles a tiny dipper it is not part of either Ursa Major or Ursa Minor, rather a cluster of stars all of its own. It was the forty-fifth image cataloged by the 19th century, astronomer Charles Messier, hence the name Messier 45.

The NASA web site is my favorite spot to start looking for any information related to the night sky. There are beautiful pictures as well as information on when and where to search the heavens for the Pleiades. The web site for NASA is:

http://www.nasa.gov/home/index.html?skipIntro=1

Another wonderful site for information about the constellation and star cluster itself is the Gibson website http://www.naic.edu/~gibson/pleiades/ where I found that the Pleiades are part of the Taurus constellation. And to go even further with site hopping for my research I found another website with an even larger set of pictures; the Astronomy resources website found here:http://www.stsci.edu/resources/

Even with all the truth the legend or myth is still larger than life. The Pleiades is covered in folklore in every culture and there are different stories for each culture. If you want to find other stories about the same group of stars check out these websites:

http://www.associatedcontent.com/article/613077/a_cherokee_myth_of_the_pleiades_and.html

http://www.firstpeople.us/FP-Html-Legends/The-Pleiades-Yokut.html

http://books.google.com/books?id=SML7keLdfagC&pg=PA241&lpg=PA241&dq=american+myth+about+the+pleiades&source=bl&ots=MC63-CCkTQ&sig=juocL4KOjrQIGRXAsZFvQd6N2D4&hl=en&ei=J0c1StTDL5OktwfD96H5Dg&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=4#PPA242,M1

http://imagine.gsfc.nasa.gov/docs/ask_astro/answers/980127b.html

As you can see, the search for answers, which is what research is after all, will take you far away from your original subject matter. And that is the worth of research, that it feeds your curiosity and rewards you with every bit of new knowledge. I could have chosen any of the many legends concerning the Pleiades; I stayed with the Greek retelling because it is my personal favorite. The point of following one specific path for research is to help you stay focused. When you research a subject the path will lead you down many tangles and brambles that do not scratch but rather entice you to keep moving, keep looking, and keep learning.

Saturn

Saturn Mosaic

Photograph courtesy NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute

 A total of 126 images taken over the course of two hours make up this mosaic picture of Saturn. The Cassini-Huygens spacecraft snapped the photos on October 6, 2004, when it was approximately 3.9 million miles (6.3 million kilometers) from Saturn. Cassini was on a four-year mission to explore the ringed planet.

Saturn Clouds

Photograph courtesy NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute

Clouds swirl on Saturn, the second largest planet in our solar system. Like its bigger neighbor Jupiter, Saturn is a gas planet made mostly of hydrogen and helium. Its magnetic field is 578 times more powerful than Earth's.

Mystery Deepens Over Where Sun Was Born

New 3-D computer simulations have delivered a crushing blow to the strongest contender for our sun's birthplace, astronomers say, returning the quest for the solar system's origins to square one.

Stars like the sun typically form in clusters with other stars. Many clusters are spread out so that the stars drift apart, but others are denser, and gravity keeps their stars close together.

The sun now stands alone, so astronomers think our star—and its newborn solar system—was either ejected from its birth cluster or drifted away from its siblings about 4.5 billion years ago.

Messier 67, or M67, is a hundred-light-year-wide ball of stars that recently passed some crucial "paternity tests" for being the sun's birthplace.

The cluster not only harbors stellar bodies similar in temperature, age, and chemistry to our sun, but M67 also drifts a relatively close 2,900 light-years away.

A new study of M67, however, undermines the existing lines of evidence and leaves almost no chance that our star could hail from the region.

(Also see "Three Theories of Planet Formation Busted, Expert Says.")

Computer simulations show that a rare chain of events—two or three massive stars lining up just right to make a gravitational slingshot—would have been needed to kick the sun out of M67 and get it where it is today.

Such a powerful event is a probabilistic Hail Mary and, even if it had occurred, the speed of the kick would have ripped our nascent solar system to shreds.

"When you have that kind of gravitational disruption, planetary disks evaporate, and existing planets acquire energy and can be expelled," said study leaderBarbara Pichardo, an astrophysicist at the National Autonomous University of Mexico.

Sun and Its Siblings Born "Like Popcorn"

Practically all of our galaxy's 200 to 400 billion stars, including the sun, were born through the gravitational collapse of diffuse clouds of dust and gas sprinkled across the Milky Way by previous generations of long-dead stars.

(Related: "Big Bang Ripples Formed Universe's First Stars.")

These star-forming clouds mix a little bit, but stars of similar chemistry tend to appear within the same clouds around the same time.

"It's like popcorn," Pichardo said. "They heat up for a long time and then pop-pop-pop, they are born."

To look for solar siblings, astronomers can use the spectrum of light shining from a star of a similar age and tag its chemical makeup, which can then be compared to the sun's.

So far, only two probable sun siblings are know to exist anywhere close by—that is, within the best existing data set of stars, which includes about a hundred thousand stars just 325 light-years in any direction from Earth.

According to that data set, the closest existing cluster with sunlike stars is M67.

The star cluster is a bit too far away and possibly younger than the sun, but at first these didn't seem like insurmountable problems to astronomers. So Pichardo and her team performed their yearlong run of 3-D computer simulations, fully expecting to add another piece of evidence to the pile.

Star Cluster Ruled Out by Speed and Bob

The new simulations relied on a detailed model of the Milky Way, its spiral arms, and even its halo of mysterious dark matter.

(Also see "Dark-Matter Galaxy Detected: Hidden Dwarf Lurks Nearby?")

The computations also accounted for the up-and-down bobbing motion of M67 and the sun through the galaxy's plane of stars—wavelike orbits that all celestial objects in the Milky Way exhibit, to some degree, thanks to complex gravitational interactions with other objects.

The goal was to rewind the clock and find all the moments in the past 4.5 billion years or so when the sun and M67 would have been lined up for a clean ejection.

"We thought we would find lots of approaching moments, but we didn't," Pichardo said.

The key factor is that the sun is currently traveling at roughly 67,000 miles (108,000 kilometers) an hour away from M67.

Pichardo and her team's simulations show that, in the unlikely event of the sun's ejection from M67 at the right place and the right time, the star's speed would have to have been closer to 130,000 miles (209,000 kilometers) an hour—much too fast to ensure the solar system's safety.

At such speeds, "if planets are not kicked out, they can at least be perturbed into noncircular orbits," Pichardo said. "A [roughly] circular orbit is a big reason the Earth is habitable and we're alive today."

If Earth's orbit were more elliptical, the planet would bake when it drifted too close to the sun and then go into a deep-freeze as it moved away, a scenario perhaps too hostile to support life.

(Related: "Earth Farthest From Sun on Fourth of July—So Why So Hot?")

Astrophysicist Julio Navarro of the University of Victoria in Canada, who wasn't involved in the study, said the work "casts quite a bit of doubt on M67" as the sun's birthplace.

Still, while he noted that many simulations are required to build up a good bed of robust data, he implied that much of the new work may in fact have been overkill.

Just examining the bobbing motion of the sun and the star cluster would have been enough, since stars ejected from clusters tend to continue moving with the same amplitude as their birthplaces.

"The vertical motion of M67 is five times larger than the [motion of the] sun. It's a more robust way to attack this problem, I think, because [M67's motion is] too energetic," Navarro said.

"The sun's so much lower, it makes you wonder how on Earth [M67] could ever be the progenitor of the sun."

Finding More "Suns" to Help the Search?

With M67 headed to the proverbial dustbin, astronomers interested in pinpointing the sun's origins have several alternative hypotheses to consider.

One theory suggests the sun's birth cluster has simply spread out into obscurity. Another posits that the sun drifted outward from close to the center of the galaxy, since many sunlike stars seem to lurk there.

(Related: "Neighboring Galaxy Caught With Stolen Stars.")

To support any of these ideas, however, more detailed and far-reaching catalogs of stars and their chemistry are essential.

"You could start looking systematically for the sun's siblings. It's nice to know where your closest relatives are, and if you do, you might be able to pinpoint their origins," said stellar physicist Bengt Gustafsson of Uppsala University in Sweden.

The best current catalog of stars, their positions, and their chemistry was recorded in the 1990s by a European satellite called Hipparcos.

A similar but more capable European satellite called Gaia, scheduled to launch sometime next year, is ready to inventory a billion stars. About 40 million of these will be within a thousand light-years of Earth—close enough to get a good read on their chemistry.

"Unfortunately, we won't have results from Gaia for at least five years," the University of Victoria's Navarro said. "But in principle, we should see [more] stars like the sun and get much closer to an answer."

The study refuting M67 as the sun's birthplace has been accepted for publication in the Astronomical Journal.

source: Dave Mosher

for National Geographic News

magnificent moon..

as we all knw.. The Moon is Earth's only known natural satellite,and the fifth largest satellite in the Solar System. It is the largest natural satellite of a planet in the Solar System relative to the size of its primary, having a quarter the diameter of Earth and ¹⁄₈₁ its mass.


orbit: 384,400 km from Earth 
diameter: 3476 km 
mass: 7.35e22 kg


m nt gonna mention much of info over here.. 
u'll get that any where on earth.. 
here i m posting few picx.. of magnificent moon.. 

 Blue moon

You saw me standing alone

Without a dream in my heart

Without a love of my own.

Blue moon

You knew just what I was there for

You heard me saying a prayer for

Someone I really could care for.

And then there suddenly appeared before me

The only one my arms will hold

I heard somebody whisper please adore me

And when I looked, the moon had turned to gold.

Blue moon

Now I’m no longer alone

Without a dream in my heart

Without a love of my own.

Astrophotos

The Great Orion Nebula

M42 & M43 The Great Orion Nebulae & its Core Complex known as the Trapezium Region. Image Credit: John Chumack

The Great Orion nebula is one of the brightest nebulae visible in the night sky. It is located about 1300 light years away in the southern part of the Orion’s belt.

We’ve collected several amazing images of the Great Orion nebula submitted by readers online. Here’s hoping that you’ll enjoy them as much as we did!

The image above was obtained by John Chumack from the high res close-up image of Trapezium taken with his 10” scope ( 30 sec., 1 minute, & 5 minutes) in his backyard in Dayton combined with the image taken using his homemade 16” scope data (10 minutes) taken at his observatory in Yellow Springs, Ohio.

Marco T. captured this image using a Canon EOS 500D camera. Here are some specs he provided:
80x40sec 800iso – 31dark – 30bias temp. 6°c
SKYWATCHER ED80 PRO BLACK DIAMOND – camera guide QHY5
HIGH light pollution (Rome – Italy)

This image was taken by Kevin Jung at the James C. Veen Observatory in Lowell, Michigan. It was a stack of three individual 60-second exposures captured using a Canon EOS 40D camera.

  Patrick Cullis captured this image using a 4″ Meade SCT with 5D Mk II on Orion Sirius Equatorial Mount.

Comet Lovejoy

Comet Lovejoy on 22 Dec. 2011 from the International Space Station. Comet Lovejoy is visible near Earth’s horizon in this nighttime image photographed by NASA astronaut Dan Burbank, Expedition 30 commander, onboard the International Space Station on Dec. 22, 2011. Credit: NASA/Dan Burbank

Part of the Soyuz rocket that brought the latest trio of crew members to the International Space Station fell back to Earth on Dec. 24, and its fiery re-entry was captured by several skywatchers in Europe. This footage taken from Germany is the best view of it, and there’s another good view below. Some people mistakenly thought it was a comet; and since this lightshow occurred on Christmas Eve, there were a few who suggested it might be Santa flying across the fly. That would have been bad news, however, to see debris breaking off the sleigh…click to see video..

what is universe???

The universe is commonly defined as the totality of everything that exists, including all physical matter and energy, the planets, stars, galaxies, and the contents of intergalactic space,although this usage may differ with the context. The term universe may be used in slightly different contextual senses, denoting such concepts as the cosmos, the world, or nature.