Few patches of sky repay a look as well as Taurus. It holds two of the most famous star clusters in the night sky, the shining Pleiades and the V-shaped Hyades, along with a red eye, the bright star Aldebaran, and the remains of an exploding star that was recorded nearly a thousand years ago.
The bull in myth
The Greeks told several stories about the bull. The best known is that Zeus fell in love with Europa, a Phoenician princess, turned himself into a gentle white bull and walked among her herd. She climbed onto his back, and he swam across the sea to Crete with her. The continent of Europe takes its name from her. The bull is older still: the same part of the sky was seen as a bull in Mesopotamia more than 4,000 years ago, and the Babylonians called it the Bull of Heaven, the animal Gilgamesh and Enkidu kill in the Epic of Gilgamesh.
Seven sisters
The Pleiades are the seven daughters of the Titan Atlas in Greek myth, though most people can see only six or seven stars with the naked eye, and the cluster actually holds hundreds. Cultures all over the world noticed them. The Maori mark the new year at their rising, calling them Matariki. In Japan they are Subaru, a name now carried by a car company whose logo shows six stars. The farmers of ancient Greece used their rising and setting to time planting and harvest.
The red eye
Aldebaran, the bull's eye, is a red giant about 65 light years away. Its name is Arabic for "the follower," because it follows the Pleiades across the sky. It also sits very close to the path of the moon, which sometimes passes in front of it in an occultation.
How to find it
Taurus is easy to find in winter. Follow the three stars of Orion's belt up and to the right and you will come to orange Aldebaran, then the Pleiades beyond it, looking like a tiny dipper. The V of the Hyades surrounds Aldebaran, though the star is not part of the cluster and lies less than half as far away.
On the star chart
On Hall's card the bull lunges forward with its head lowered and its horns out, and the stars of the constellation are marked as small black stars across its body.
Little-known facts
- In July 1054, Chinese astronomers recorded a "guest star" in Taurus bright enough to be seen in daylight for weeks. Its remains are the Crab Nebula, which was the first object in Charles Messier's famous catalogue.
- A cave painting at Lascaux in France shows a bull with a cluster of dots above its shoulder, which some researchers have compared to the Pleiades. The match is debated.
- The Hyades cluster, about 150 light years away, is the closest open star cluster to the Earth.
- The sun was in Taurus at the spring equinox from roughly 4000 to 1800 BCE, which is why bull worship was so widespread in the early Bronze Age.
- Taurus is traditionally ruled by Venus, and its glyph is a circle with horns.
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