The Nautical Almanac # 0 --- Polaris, The Pole Star

 

In antiquity, astronomers (actually astrologers of the time) imagined patterns among the stars of the night sky. These patterns or asterisms they called constellations, and in naming them ascribed certain qualities to them. The night sky became a cultural storybook reflecting every people's myths and history. For example, the star pattern called Scorpius (the Scorpion) in Greco-Roman culture was the Swan in Mesopotamian cultures and Maui's Fishhook in Polynesia. People born "under" various constellations (i.e., the Sun was "in" --- actually backdropped by --- said constellation at that time of year) were ascribed personality traits in keeping with the mythos of the tribe or culture. The odd thing about such ascriptions is that they often seem to be amazingly accurate.    Constellations though, are true pareidolias. From Earth, all constellations seem to be equidistant against the velvet black sky. In truth, the stars in our familiar constellations lie hundreds of light years from one another in different planes, and may be star systems that distance has blurred into a single shining point of light. Each one is a Sun unto itself. Under optimum conditions human beings can see about 6,000 suns on a given night. About 60 of these distant suns, often the brightest or most evident, have become critical to celestial navigation over time. Catalogues are kept of these crucial stars, and in them Polaris is either numbered "0" or not numbered at all. underscoring its importance. It is Star Zero of the Nautical Almanac.  Although the ancients referred to "fixed" stars and described other quicker moving points of light as "Planetes" or "Wanderers", even the fixed stars are not truly fixed; they shift position over time with imperceptible slowness. The "Planets" turned out to be other worlds circling our own Sun (and we have since discovered high-speed suns screaming through space at incredible velocities, too). In the Northern Hemisphere, the central point of the sky is the North Star, the Pole Star, or Polaris. By some weird cosmic coincidence Polaris has shone down directly upon the northernmost point on Earth's globe for tens of thousands of years. Time lapse photography of the Earth's rotation shows the night stars circling around a single point, and that point is Polaris. It marks True North and is the starting point of celestial navigation. Find Polaris, and all else follows. It too has moved over the years but not appreciably so in the last five millennia. Arab astronomers of the Middle Ages called it the "Ship Star." Christian ecclesiastics called it "Stella Maris" or "Mary's Star." Pagans called it Orentil. Astrologically, it is the first of fifteen Behenian Stars which have their own influences in a natal chart. Polaris is, oddly, considered an "unfortunate" star whose influence causes afflictions, but it is also the star which confers occult sensitivities. Polaris though is not a single star but a triad of three stars, the largest being Polaris Alpha, a yellow supergiant five and a half times the mass of our own Sun and thirty eight times the size. It has grown so large because it is exhausting its hydrogen. Polaris Alpha is circled by Polaris Beta, and both are circled by the much smaller Polaris Alpha Beta. Polaris Beta can be seen on very clear nights with the naked eye, and other times with a modest telescope. Polaris Alpha is a second magnitude star, and increasing in brightness over time. The Polaris star system lies 300 light years from Earth. It is about four billion years old, the age of our own Sun. Polaris is the brightest star, and makes up the handle-end of the Little Dipper (Ursa Minor or the Little Bear). The two stars that make up the leading edge of the Big Dipper (Ursa Major or the Great Bear) point directly at Polaris. To find Polaris in the northern night sky is to have a sense of one's own position on the Earth. As a ship or person moves north, Polaris rises ever higher into the sky. At the Equator Polaris is on the horizon. At the latitude of New York, Polaris is at approximately 45 degrees. And at the North Pole, Polaris is at the zenith of the sky. While it does naught to fix longitude the Pole Star is indispensable for reckoning latitude north of the Equator.