20 Days to Opening Day

Opening Day 2008 for the Timber Rattlers is April 3. That is 20 days from today. This off-season, the countdown will be based on books. Each day between now and Opening Day 2008, I will pick a random book out of my library and excerpt a passage off the page number corresponding with the number of days remaining to the first pitch of the new season. I will try not to repeat a book during the countdown.

Today’s book is An Intimate Look at the Night Sky by Chet Raymo. This is a discussion of the constellation Taurus.

The stars of the Bull’s face, excluding Aldebaran, are part of a true cluster called Hyades (HI-a-deez). Binoculars or a telescope will reveal many more stars than those you see. These stars were born together out of the same nebula of gas and dust, and are now drifting away from the place of their birth. They are the nearest cluster to us, only 130 light-years distant, but their drift is taking them farther away. Millions of years from now they will no longer be visible to the naked eye.

Aldebaran is not part of the cluster, but lies closer to us along the same line of sight. It is a red giant star, near the end of its life, although no nearly so large at Betelgeuse.

The Pleiades are a very young cluster of stars, only a few tens of millions of years old – mere infants as stars go. Long-exposure photographs reveal hundreds of stars still swaddled in remnants of the nebula out of which they were born. They are about 400 light-years from Earth. Don’t be fooled by the faintness of these stars in our sky; the brightest of the Seven Sisters, Alcyone (al-SIGH-oh-nee) is a thousand times more luminous than the Sun.

Not far from the tip of the Bull’s lowered horn, and invisible to the naked eye, is the famous Crab Nebula, the shattered remains of a massive star that blew up in the year 1054 C.E., Earth time. Since the star was many thousands of light-years from Earth, the explosion actually occurred thousands of years before it was observed by humans. For weeks this supernova was the brightest starlike object in the sky, rivaling Venus at its brightest. Sky gazers everywhere must have watched with wonder.

Not in the book. Just adding for the heck of it.

Taurus, the Bull

Crab Nebula

The Pleiades or Seven Sisters

Put today’s excerpt in a baseball context.