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Medusa's eye, Halloween fireballs and more: 5 skywatching targets to look out for this spooky season
Five spooky skywatching targets perfect for naked eye stargazing this Halloween!
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The spooky season is officially here! To celebrate, we've put together a list of five Halloween-themed skywatching targets that you can enjoy with nothing but the naked eye or binoculars and, of course, clear skies.
Over millennia, the night sky has helped shape human beliefs. In return, we have imprinted our myths, stories and perceptions upon it, seeing monsters and mythology in the twinkling lights of the stars and assigning sinister aspects to innocent cosmic objects.
Many of these ghostly impressions and meanings have survived to the present day. Here are a few of our favorites.
Don't be fooled by their beauty; the blue-white stars of the Pleiades are dripping in spooky lore. Ancient Celtic druids would hold the celebration of Samhain — the precursor to Halloween — when the star cluster reached its highest point in the autumn night sky at midnight.
The veil separating the worlds of the living and the dead was believed to be at its thinnest around this time, granting the departed a brief window to visit the living before the realms separated once again.
The Pleiades appears as a tight collection of six or seven bright twinkling stars to the naked eye, while a pair of binoculars will reveal dozens more of the 1,000-strong star cluster.
Stargazers in the U.S. can find the Pleiades using the three familiar stars of Orion's Belt, which glisten in the eastern sky in the hours preceding midnight. Trace an imaginary line upward through the trio of stars until you find the bright orange star Aldebaran, which represents an eye of the great bull represented in the constellation Taurus. The Pleiades can be found glowing less than 15 degrees above! (Reminder: Your clenched fist held at arm's length covers about 10 degrees of sky.)
Next we turn our gaze to the "Demon Star" Algol — a beautiful binary system that represents an eye of the monstrous Gorgon Medusa, whose severed head is depicted in the constellation Perseus.