Constellation of the Month: Virgo (the Maiden)

 

Virgo, the maiden or virgin, is the zodiac sign between Leo and Libra as well the constellation on that celestial belt, prominent in the south in the May evening sky (from the perspective of northern latitudes).  I'm inclined to believe it's also the biggest of the zodiac constellations, taking up a large section of that sector of the sky.  Virgo has one bright, first-magnitude star in Spica, a binary star some 250 light years distant, and which stands out starkly to the naked eye against its relatively faint neighboring stars. A funny, trivial event about Spica occurred when I was in high school...if I still remember it I guess it wasn't so trivial, though.  I was in my senior year sitting in the math library doing homework when a kid a couple of years younger, who attended the same astronomy club meetings as myself, approached me holding a book.  He pointed to the star Spica and asked me how I pronounced it.  I replied "spike-uh" and he triumphally responded "You're wrong, it's "spee-kuh" and pointed to the book's pronunciation guide, which turned out to confirm my version, not his.  Flustered, he just walked away, defeated.  I think I remember that weird, random event because it exemplified the general smartass, know-it-all attitude I encountered among my classmates back then...even decades later, after I began this blog, I got hit with the same hypercompetitive type of petty one-upmanship from kids...now supposedly adults...with whom I attended that high school: I never gave a hoot about how you pronounced something as long as we both understood what we were talking about.  But back to Virgo: this constellation does contain several deep-space Messier objects in a region (see above map for the Virgo Cluster), all of them other galaxies: M49, 58, 59, 60, 61, 84, 86, 87, 89 and 90...whew, that's a lot! But then consider that not only does this cluster contain some 1300-2000 galaxies, but that astronomers regard it as being "small"...I don't know about you, but that makes me feel really, really small in the grand scheme of things...  

When I step outside this time of year to view the night sky, the first star I look for, facing east, is Arcturus in Boötes (the first constellation I wrote about, in June of 2020)...then I trace a line south and west (down and to the right) and there's my old, far-away friend Spica.  And with this article, I've now gone around the sky twice, covering 24 different interesting constellations. Next month I plan to begin Year Three...