I often read Paul Simon's Weather Eye column in the Times, anf generally learn something I had no idea of before. Yesterday's piece was about Sirius, the brightest star in the sky after the Sun.
We see stars twinkling, caused by atmospheric disturbances, but when they are low down near the horizon they twinkle in rainbow colours. We probably miss this with most stars (I've certainly never noticed it) because they are less bright and so harder to see whan they are low down in the sky. But Sirius is very conspicuous and its many-coloured twinkling is well-known and has often been photographed. A good example is here
I looked Sirius up in the Oxford English Dictionary and was suprised to find this quote from Tess of the D'Ubervilles, seeming to suggest that Thomas Hardy might have been aware of the Sirius' multicoloured twinkling.
"Each gem turned into an Aldebaran or a Sirius—a constellation of white, red, and green flashes, that interchanged their hues with her every pulsation."
The Twinkling Dog Star
I often read Paul Simon's Weather Eye column in the Times, anf generally learn something I had no idea of before. Yesterday's piece was about Sirius, the brightest star in the sky after the Sun.
We see stars twinkling, caused by atmospheric disturbances, but when they are low down near the horizon they twinkle in rainbow colours. We probably miss this with most stars (I've certainly never noticed it) because they are less bright and so harder to see whan they are low down in the sky. But Sirius is very conspicuous and its many-coloured twinkling is well-known and has often been photographed. A good example is here
https://earthsky.org/todays-image/photo-sirius-in-many-colors
I looked Sirius up in the Oxford English Dictionary and was suprised to find this quote from Tess of the D'Ubervilles, seeming to suggest that Thomas Hardy might have been aware of the Sirius' multicoloured twinkling.
"Each gem turned into an Aldebaran or a Sirius—a constellation of white, red, and green flashes, that interchanged their hues with her every pulsation."