The daily morning journal and courier., 1900-07-09

Kappa. Alpha forms, with Vega and
 Altair an equlateral triangle. The
 highest star in the Serpent is Alpha
 Serpentis, or Unuk, of the second mag
 nitude. The straight line drawn from
 Alpha Serpentis to Zeta Ophiuehi con
 tains five stars which in combination
 with two other stars on each side of 1t form a characteristic confguraton re-
 semblng a hanging lamp so very
 much as to deserve the honor of being
 Q separate and particular constellation
 of It's own, called by that name. It Is
 certainly one of the most striking con- | fgurations of stars in the summer sky.
 North of Ophiuchus, between it and ! the zodiacal constellation Draco, is the 1 fine and large constellation Hercules, | whose most characteristic oonfiguration is large triangle, and north of 1t 8 1 somewhat smaller quadrilateral The southernmost vertex in the triangle is marked by Alpha Hereulis, or Ras AL Sethi, in the head of the demi-god. The two others are Beta and Delta. Alpha is a fine double star of the second mag nitude, colors orange and blue. The four stars of the quadrilateral are Ep- sion, Zeta, Eta, and Pi, with the faint star Rho near the last A third of the way on the diagonal of the quadrilater- al, between Eta and Zeta, the former in the northwestern and the latter in the southwestern corner, is situated the cluster, Messier 1S, perhaps the finest star cluster in the heavens though scarcely visible to the unaided eye, constellation Hercules is of special in- terest for us terrestrial inhabitants. since it has exclusively been proved that the sun with all his splendid cor tege of planets and their satellites moves toward certain point in that constellation, known by the name of the "apex of the suns way"
 Erecting an equilateral triangle on the line joining Pi and Delta as a base toward the. east, the easternmost yer tex very nearly coincides with this re- markable point toward which we are sailing with velocity of more than a million miles year. Some have main tained that this swift motion of the sun affects the relative motion of sun and planets This, however, plausible as 1t might appear at first, is altogether an erroneous notion. for they leave out of account that the real motion of the planets in space has just as little to do with the relative motion of sun and planets as the relative position of person walking on deck of ship to the different parts of the ship with her mo- ton.
 A little way south of Beta Opiuchi there are five small stars in the Milky Way, forming a V-lke shape, like the Hyades, which in the latter part of the past century were proposed as a new constellation "Poniatowski Bull Although still found in many maps, 1t is now discredited by most uranograph- ecs.
 Very near the meridian is seen the of Lyra with the splendid star Vega. Aquila with the first mag nitude star Altair, is rising higher and higher in the east, and east of 1t the constellaton Cygnus is rising up. Bootes, with the magnificent star Arc turus, and Corona Borealis, that beau tlful sen1i-crcle of stars are slowly bending toward the west. Virgo is half way between the meridian and the western horizon and Leo is low down In the southwest. The spring constella- tions are making room for those that the skies of the summer seas Washington Times.