03/08/2018 – Ephemeris – Beware the Great Underwater Panther

Ephemeris for Thursday, March 8th. The Sun will rise at 7:07. It’ll be up for 11 hours and 31 minutes, setting at 6:39. The Moon, 1 day before last quarter, will rise at 1:56 tomorrow morning.

The Anishinaabek people of the Great Lakes Region, which includes the Ottawa or Odawa, Chippewa and Ojibwe Indians have two constellations of winter that I know of. The first is The Winter Maker which uses many of Orion’s stars plus Aldebaran and Procyon. It rises in the eastern skies in the evening as winter is beginning. The second, of late winter and early spring is Curly Tail, the Great Underwater Panther. Which uses the stars of Leo the lion’s backward question mark as its tail and the small knot of stars that are the head of Hydra the water snake below Cancer as its head. I imagine this constellation was a warning to youngsters to keep off the thinning ice of spring, lest they fall in and be snatched by the great underwater panther that lives beneath the ice.

The times given are for the Traverse City/Interlochen area of Michigan. They may be different for your location.

Addendum

Finder animation for western and Anishinaabek constellations for March 8, 2018 at 9 p.m. Click on image to enlarge. Created using Stellarium and GIMP.

The Anishinaabek constellation drawings are from Ojibwe Sky Star Map Constellation Guide  by Annette S. Lee, William Wilson, Jeffrey Tibbets and Carl Gawboy available locally and online.  They are part of the latest editions of Stellarium, a free planetarium program.  Links to it are on the left.  Other information and links are available within the Sky Lore tab.

Here’s one of the links: http://www.nativeskywatchers.com/.  It also contains links to Lakota star maps and lore.