The Bridgeport evening farmer., 1916-10-30

- November enables us to welcome to our map after an absence of many months two of the finest and best known groups of the entire roster of cancellations: Gemini. the Twins, and Orion, the Great Hunter. These are the first of the so-called Winter con- steIlations to greet us, and they will remain to delight us until well within next Spring. Very low in the east ern sky early in the month, they will slowly climb to more commanding po- sitions and soon become objects for excellent observation.
 AS last month, we are enabled to put upon our sky map only the planets Jupiter and Uranus; but Saturn rises soon after the hour of our map and can be found in the constellation Can cer to the east of Gemini. Next month we shall be able to locate him on the map. Mars is not well placed for observation, as he is with us during the day, when the Sun blots out his rays from our vision.
 THE CONSTELLATION
 OF THE TWINS.
 This group consists mainly of two very bright stars placed in field particularly lacking in bright luniin- aries and thus accentuating their own brilliance. The brighter one, a first magnitude, is Pollux and is just a trifle more souther1y. further from the North Pole, than his twin, Castor, whose magnitude is about half way between first and a second. Some three hundred years ago an astrono- mer who made table of the stars in the order of their relative brightness and gave them their names as Alpha and Beta Geminorum considered Cas- tor the brighter of the two and call ed him Alpha. We do not know which of these stars has changed, whether Castor has diminished or Pollux increased his brightness: we can only be sure that some change has occurred and within a comparatively short time, too, as astronomic epochs go.
 With a small telescope it is possi- ble to resolve the star Castor into two stars, binary system whose period of rotation of one about the other is approximately 1000 years. The smaller of these itself has been found spectroscopically to be double; this cannot be seen in any telescope, as one of the components is a non-luminous body, its presence being inferred from the motions of the luminous one. The whole system Castor is receding from us at the rate of 4.5 miles per second while Pollux Is approaching the solar system a tthe rate of S3 miles per secondhand this may possibly &C., count for the change in relative brightness.
 ORION THE HUNTER.
 It will pay you well to become familiar with the great group of Orion as it is without doubt the most beau tiful, as well as the most spoken of constellation in the entire Armament. It's appearance is so characteristic that there should be no difficulty in learning 1t and recognizing it at any time that it may be above the hor- izon. This month in the evening, look toward the eastern horizon, and you will see three bright stars about equadistantly placed and the line them practically perpendicu- lar to the horizon; to the northward is the reddish Betelgeuze, to the southward the brilliant first magni- tude star Rigel. Watch the group as it gradually rises higher and, high CT, until the stars above mentioned form a line parallel to the horizon. These three stars form the Sword Belt of the mighty hunter, Betel- geuze being his right shoulder and Rigel his left foot. But let the read CT not imagine that the Greeks &C., tually considered the consultations to show likenesses to the things for which they named them; it was only
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