This beautiful celestial object smiled down at me from an august night sky recently. ‘Is it the Moon?’ wondered my mind. ‘Oh no! Not the right direction on the compass!’ Trying to squint up at this warmly lit up object, I quickly grabbed my phone to look it up through the SkyView Lite app.
The amateur night sky watcher in me was happily surprised to attach a name to this star … Psi Uma !
It’s been very hot in the days here this past Summer. The southern sea tried hard to mist over as a foamy blanket but the Sun appeared to show its might over the oceans… creating a heat wave that scorched and one could only hope to just stay indoors and stay hydrated. Thankfully with the arrival of monsoons the heat wave went away but this image stayed in my mind. As I was thinking back to the past few months unfolding in my mind, the stars & that august night sky took up a bright spot in my memory and I decided to google it up.
Psi Ursae Majoris (Psi UMa, ψ Ursae Majoris, ψ UMa) is a star in the northern circumpolar constellation of Ursa Major. Though it is 144.5 light years away from Earth, it has an apparent visual magnitude of +3.01, making it a third magnitude star and one of the brighter members of the constellation. Phew! No wonder I could see it in the night sky from the house’s rooftop !
My classroom science kicked in and I looked up the distance of Sun from Earth… approximately 150 million kilometers … well that’s not even a fraction of the distance Psi Uma is and yet here it was… shining so brightly in my night view ! With a smile I was wondering, “What if it was as nearer as the Sun? Would it shine as big as the Sky !”
The Chinese astronomy refers to the Psi Ursa Majoris or Psi Uma as Tien Tsan or Ta Tsun meaning “Extremely Honorable”. Apparently this name was derived from the word Pinyin: Tàizūn, meaning Royals because within the Purple Forbidden enclosure of Chinese constellations, this star stands alone as the only member of the Royals asterism.
Stars and constellations of this Purple Forbidden enclosure lie near the north celestial pole and are visible all year from temperate latitudes in the Northern Hemisphere. I guess I was just fortunate to catch it ! My brush with the Royals 🙂
With the weather changing to rainy season here, the skyline is getting cloudy more often. I’ll just have to wait for the clouds to fly away to catch another spectacular visitor some day…
Meanwhile happy reading & stay blissfully healthy !
Twisted Fabric 