12/15/2020 – Ephemeris – Hyades, the face of Taurus the bull

This is Ephemeris for Tuesday, December 15th. Today the Sun will be up for 8 hours and 49 minutes, setting at 5:02, and it will rise tomorrow at 8:14. The Moon, 1 day past new, will set at 6:03 this evening.

The face of the constellation Taurus the bull looks like the letter V sideways above the rising Orion the Hunter in the east at 9 p.m. The bright star at the tip of a letter V of stars is Aldebaran. Look with binoculars at the letter V shape and you will see the stars of the Hyades star cluster The Hyades is the closest star cluster to us, at about 153 light years. And is important for that reason. Before satellites like Hipparcos and Gaia the Hyades was the only star cluster that could be directly measured by a technique called parallax, using the radius of the Earth’s orbit as one side of a surveyors enormous triangle. Its many stars at the same distance were used to determine distances of star clusters even farther away. Additional techniques based on the distance of the Hyades allowed us to measure distances to the nearest galaxies.

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

Addendum

Aldebaran in the ‘V’ shape of the Hyades (The face of Taurus the bull) with the Pleiades above. Aldebaran is not part of the Hyades, being about halfway between us and the cluster. Created using Stellarium.

HR diagram showing the Hyades and Pleiades. Credit: European Southern Observatory.

The Hertzsprung–Russell diagram or HR diagram is one of the great astronomical tools developed in the early 20th century by plotting stars by surface temperature horizontally (hot to cool, left to right) and brightness vertically. It turns out that stars in the prime of life and shining via converting hydrogen to helium lie on a diagonal line  from hot and bright from the upper left to cool and dim to the lower right. The line is called the main sequence. In plotting the Hyades stars against other star cluster stars the vertical displacement of the main sequence line is a function of the relative distances of the two star clusters from us. This is just one of the uses of the HR diagram.