The Sirius-Canopus Hour and Yemen

We contemplated the Coma Hour and the limiting latitude for seeing the Southern Cross.  The other lantern that can lurk at the southern horizon is Canopus, second brightest of stars.

It is also called Alpha Carinae, being the lucida of the large constellation that is the “keel” of the ancient ship Argo.  It is 310 light years away, thus intrinsically far brighter than Sirius at 8.6 light years.  I think it may have been used for spacecraft navigation to lock onto, because it is farther than Sirius from the ecliptic’s interfering solar-system luminaries.  Maybe someone can tell me whether that is correct.

Canopus is almost due south of Sirius.  So the star hour at which to glimpse it is the Sirius Hour, sidereal time 6 hours.

See the end note about enlarging illustrations.

Canopus lies less far south than the Southern Cross, by about ten degrees.  Its declination is -53°; it passes overhead for Tierra del Fuego.  So the limiting latitude for Canopus to come up to the horizon is 90° north of that, 37° north.

I’ve made the sky chart for a little farther south, 35°, so that you can see how Canopus makes a short arc above the south point on the horizon.  I’ve added rising and setting arrows on the celestial equator, which show how much the sky rotates in an hour.

Again, the stripes, which I call gores, represent the bands of the celestial sphere that culminate – cross the zenith – at the 24 successive star hours.  The sidereal time for the picture is 6h30m, with that right ascension culminating.

Star hours

I started these named hours with the Andromeda Hour (0h) in Astronomical Calendar 1976.  Fred Schaaf liked the scheme, referred to it often in his columns for Sky & Telescope, and I am hoping that he will go ahead with his project of a book structured this way, for which I would make illustrations.  I think his proposed title is The Heavenly Hours.  Fred, if you are reading, this is the question I’m uncertain about, and on which our readers may give opinions:

Should each star hour begin with, or be centered on, the cardinal line of right ascension by which we number it?  For example, should this Sirius Hour be from sidereal time 6h to 7h, or from 5h30m to 6h30m?   Thus, should the gore be bounded on the west by the cardinal line (as in my present picture), or should it straddle the cardinal line?

The question may need a bit more illustration, which I’ll have to postpone to another tomorrow, because there’s so much to be said about Canopus and the hunt for it.

The seasons when this Hour comes around

The Sirius Hour, sidereal time 6 to 7, comes at about 10 PM in January, 8 PM in February, then in twilight or daylight; then about 8 AM in August, 6 AM in September, 4 AM in October, 2 AM in November, midnight in December.

To see Canopus, you have to be studying the southern part of your horizon in one of those propitious times of night, and the closer you are to the limiting latitude the briefer will be the opportunity.

Around the world, latitude line 35° north lies at about the southern end of California’s Great Valley, then runs just south of Flagstaff, Arizona; just north of Greenville, South Carolina; just south of Tangier, Tunis, Crete, Aleppo, Tehran, and across the middle of China.

Tales of Canopus-sighting

John Goss told me in May 2016 that, from an airplane traveling at about 35,000 feet over Arizona and New Mexico into southern California, he saw, about 10º above the southern horizon, in continuous twilight, a stationary light that he realized was Canopus, brighter Sirius being above it.

“This was yet another demonstration of the effect of a spherical Earth – actually two demonstrations. First, Canopus, which only reaches as high as the southern horizon line in Roanoke [Virginia; latitude 37°], was now easily found… We had moved nearly 10º further south, so the stars all moved 10º farther north, making Canopus plain as day – well, twilight. Second, since we were traveling to the west, we were nearly keeping up with Earth’s rotation [that is, with the shadow of night], allowing Canopus to remain in nearly the same spot for well over ninety minutes.”  A third effect was the elevation of 35,000 feet, which further depressed the sightline toward Canopus.

When I lived at Traveler’s Rest, north of Greenville, there was a house a few further miles north into the country, at which, set in concrete on its front lawn, was a pier for mounting a telescope.  It had been put there by Professor Patty, a former chairman of the Furman University physics department; in the house now lived his successor, Tom Goldsmith (pioneer of color television).  He got me to show people the stars with this telescope, and told me he had been able to see through it Canopus.

Before this I had lived in the Navajo reservation, which is north of Flagstaff.  For the cover picture of Astronomical Calendar 2006 I tried to interpret what I had learned of Navajo star lore.  It seemed that Coyote’s Star, also called the Monthless Star, might be Canopus.  After Black God arranged the stars neatly on a blanket, mischievous Coyote flung them up into the chaotic spread we see.  But one star remained in Black God’s pouch, and Coyote plopped it at the south and called it “Monthless.”  What did that mean?  Only Coyote could tell us, and he may have mischievously meant the opposite.

Far from being “monthless,” Canopus’s visibility is strongly dependent on the time of year.  And it seems unlikely that Navajos would have noticed its low fleeting appearances.  And, though their origin myth says they came up into their land from lower worlds, linguistics says that they and their Apache cousins migrated from Arctic Canada, so they had never lived in a more southerly country.

Yet they borrowed elements of culture from the Hopis just to their south, who were related to more southerly peoples all the way to the Aztecs.  And (to quote from that cover picture story):

“Parties of Navajos used to be sent to the tops of the four sacred mountains surrounding their land, to fetch water, soil, and herbs for use in ceremonies.  From thirteen thousand feet – twice the height of their plateau home – they would have put themselves in effect a degree farther south, or two degrees farther south than the corresponding position at sea-level.  The great star would have arched this much higher above the southern horizon, in midwinter midnights, and might have impressed itself on them, especially during the exhaustion and elation of such a religious journey.  ‘Behold – the star Coyote tried to hide!'”

A passage that comes into my head from Berenice’s Hair:

“And only four dawns later Berenice, on deck before the sun, saw the stars fade but one rise at the far line of the sea.  What could that star be? – it must be Canopus, the great star of the south, that guides travelers in the desert, but that we of the middle lands see only once a year.”

She is sailing south from Rhodes to Egypt, where she is to be married, and the star proves to be not Canopus but the sun-reflecting mirror at the top of the Pharos, the towering lighthouse of Alexandria.

And the name of Canopus?

In Greek legend (preserved by Conon, the inventor of constellation Coma Berenices, and Strabo, the geographer), Canobus or Canopus was a good-looking young man who steered Menelaus’s ship.  After the nine-year siege of Troy (caused by the stealing of Menelaus’s wife Helen by the Trojan prince Paris), the many Greek leaders sailed for home, but had epic journeys (the nostoi, “returns”), such as Odysseus’s nine-year wandering.  Menelaus’s squadron was wind-blown to Egypt, where with his recaptured wife, most beautiful of mortals, he was to spend nine pleasant years as a tourist.  When his ship touched there, Canopus steered it in.  A local prophetess fell in love with him; he scorned her; a snake bit him and he died.  Menelaus raised a monument to him, and also named for him the deep-south star toward which he perhaps had aimed.

Canopus is described as a pilot.  If so, he was an Egyptian who had come out on a boat and guided the ships past shoals and into the Nile.  If, rather, he was a helmsman, he was a Greek and had steered the squadron’s flagship across the sea.  That seems more likely, given Menelaus’s devotion to him, and his effect on a local lady.

Later, in historical time, Greeks established a trading colony, which they called Canopus, beside the westernmost of the many mouths of the Nile, which is therefore called the Canopic Mouth.  When Alexander conquered Egypt, he founded the greater city of Alexandria not far to the west, so that Canopus became almost a suburb.  But its nome, or province, was called the Menelaite or Canopite Nome.  Canopus town was called by the Egyptians something like Pekwat, and later by the Arabs Abu Qir.  At or near it were fought three Battles of Aboukir: 1799, when Napoleon defeated the Turkish rulers of Egypt; 1798, the naval Battle of the Nile, and 1801, at both of which the British beat the French expeditionary force.

The ancient Egyptians, when mummifying corpses, removed the internal organs and stored them in tall stone or earthenware vessels, and these are called canopic jars.  The apparent reason is that early Egyptologists imagined that this treatment was given to the dead sailor.

But canopy: however much we would like to derive it from the canopy of stars, and that from this jewel in the canopy, we cannot.  The Greek word for “mosquito” was kônôps, “cone-face.” So a gauze hung over a bed, a mosquito net, was kônôpeion, borrowed into classical Latin as conopeium, and corrupted in medieval Latin to canopeium.

The name Conops has been given to a genus of insects, but they live in the tropical Americas, and they are not mosquitoes but true bugs (members of the order Hemiptera).

Still, we might refashion the legend and say that Menelaus’s pilot was punctured not by a snake but by a mosquito.

In short, we can, from the name of sailor Canopus, trace words for several things, a river mouth, a city, a jar, a star; but we cannot, as far as I know, trace the name itself back to a linguistic origin, such as am Indo-European root.  I speculated that the Greeks adopted some African word.

Home Planet Department

Yemen, whose latitude is around 15° north, can see Canopus rise to 22° above its horizon.

A situation that arises in human affairs is that a gang of relatively few men is darkly determined to keep a grip on the commodity called power.  One such gang consists of oil-rich religious tyrants in Iran, another consists of oil-rich religious tyrants in Saudi Arabia.  Each insists that the country they rule be the dominant power of the region.  We might call them the Make Iran Greatest Gang and the Make Saudi Greatest Gang.  So one gang seeks to undermine the other by a proxy war in one of its allied smaller countries.  Iran sponsors and arms revolutionaries in Yemen, and the Saudis pummel Yemen with weapons supplied by the US and UK.  “We suffer ballistic missiles all night and drone attacks all day.”

The war has killed more than 100,000 Yemenis and displaced 8 million; 80% of the population is dependent on aid to survive; 400,000 children under five are sliding into death by starvation.

Starving children don’t cry.

A star that has appeared on the horizon is that America now has a humane president, who in his first foreign policy speech said “This war has to end.”  He froze arms sales to Saudi Arabia, and will send an envoy to Yemen to press both sides to a negotiated solution.

The UN hoped to raise $3.85 billion for the desperately needed humanitarian aid to Yemen; received only $1.7 billion.  Biden greatly increased the US contribution, to $350 million for 2021.

By shameful contrast, the UK cut its contribution from £160 million to £87 million, while increasing arms exports to Saudi Arabia to £1.4 billion.

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ILLUSTRATIONS in these posts are made with precision but have to be inserted in another format.  You may be able to enlarge them on your monitor.  One way: right-click, and choose “View image”, then enlarge.  Or choose “Copy image”, then put it on your desktop, then open it.  On an iPad or phone, use the finger gesture that enlarges (spreading with two fingers, or tapping and dragging with three fingers).  Other methods have been suggested, such as dragging the image to the desktop and opening it in other ways.

Sometimes I make improvements or corrections to a post after publishing  it.  If you click on the title, rather than on ‘Read more’, I think you are sure to see the latest version.

This weblog maintains its right to be about astronomy or anything under the sun.