The Northern Crown, A Constellation That Kinda Looks Like Its Namesake. Kinda.

.....For today, let's go back to my discussion of Boötes is a herdsman with his dogs (the constellation Canes Venatici) chasing the Great Bear (Ursa Major) forever around the pole, or “the kite”.  Next to Boöte, there is a semicircle of stars which makes up the constellation of Corona Borealis, the Northern Crown.

.....There is not a lot in Corona Borealis, even using a telescope.  In fact, with an eight-inch telescope there are no visible deep-sky objects at all.  So, let me put in a personal anecdote as a filler.  When I was much younger, carrying my telescope out to an extraneous plot of land behind our house, one of our neighbors asked me about what constellations were visible, and when I got to this one, he said,” No. That’s not it. I’ve seen that before and that’s not it!!!” (He didn’t shout, but he was speaking very definitively and I’ve learned that nothing is more definitive on the internet than using three exclamation points.) I realized pretty much instantaneously that he was thinking about the northern lights, the *aurora* borealis, but I cannot remember if I tried to explain that, or just thought, “Whatever, old dude” (or whatever the early 80’s version of that was) and went on.

.....At least Corona Borealis looks kind of like a circlet of stars, but recreating Boötes would allow us to reimage the second constellation that we are looking at today, Corona Borealis away from being the Northern Crown into, say, the Kite-Eating Tree from Peanuts.

.....(I know that the kite appears larger than the tree; it’s foreshortening. The tree is in the background, waiting for the kite to slip up, drift away and get caught. If this story seems too grim for backyard astronomy, please reread the original myth.)