Cassiopeia, Queen of Ethiopia
was a woman of supreme
beauty, but she was as proud as she was lovely. At first, she
boasted that she was the fairest in all of Ethiopia; and then,
she claimed to be the most beautiful in all the world. At last,
she proclaimed that she was more beautiful even than any goddess
above. One day the Nereids, the water nymphs renowned for their
grace and beauty, heard her say that she was fairer than any water
nymph that ever lived. The Nereids complained to their father,
Neptune, who rose in anger, plunged his trident into the sea and
created the most evil and ferocious monster, Cetus. This creature
he sent off to Cassiopeia's land of Ethiopia with the command
to lay waste the country and to terrorize the inhabitants. This
Cetus did, and the people begged King Cepheus to save them from
further harm. At a loss, Cepheus consulted the oracle, and he
was advised that his only recourse was to sacrifice his daughter
Andromeda to the appetite of the monster. Well, you know what
happened to the princess, and how she was saved by the hero Perseus.
All these mythical characters were transformed into constellations
and placed in the northern sky. Queen Cassiopeia, bound into her
celestial chair, was placed where she swings upside down as she
revolves around the Pole Star. Thus, for half of every night the
once proud Queen must hang head down in an uncomfortable and humiliating
position.
Of course, that is myth;
the real story is this:
On a bright autumn day
four brothers went out in their canoe to hunt for elk. Their younger
brother stayed home along the Quillayute River in what is now
the Olympic Peninsula of the State of Washington. A good distance
upriver, the eldest of the brothers declared that this was a good
location and the group pulled their canoe ashore, packed up what
they would need for lunch and for hunting, and set off on foot
in search of game.
Soon they met a large
man walking toward them. He greeted them and asked of their plans.
“We are hunting for elk, Man of the Prairie,” the boys
told him. “I can help you with all the elk you want,”
the man replied. “Stay here and hide, and I will drive the
animals down this ravine for you to shoot.” The Man of the
Prairie began to walk away, then called to the boys that he would
be willing to trade some special arrows he had for the poor ones
of theirs. The brothers agreed and exchanged for the good-looking
arrows. The man went off, telling the boys to be ready.
After a time, a huge elk
charged down the ravine toward the four brothers. The arrows proved
to be of no use, and the elk killed all of the four. Then the
elk magically turned back into his form of the Man of the Prairie.
The fifth brother, dismayed
when the others did not return, set out in search of them, coming
finally to the empty canoe. Following his brothers’ footsteps
across the prairie, he too met the Man of the Prairie.
The trickster tried his
evil chicanery on the fifth brother, but the youth was a medicine
man with magic of his own. So he could see that this was a trick
and declared, “I will not trade with you.” When the
man turned to leave, the youngest brother hid behind a tree. And
when the Man of the Prairie turned himself into an elk and came
charging back, the brother was ready with his bow. He shot one
arrow into the elk for each of his four brothers, and killed the
pretender. When he had skinned the elk he found that the skin
stretched larger than the prairie. He threw the elk skin up into
the sky. There in the northern sky the elk skin remains. Stars
mark the holes where the youngest brother had driven in stakes
while stretching the skin to dry.
One of the most distinctive
and well-known constellations, Cassiopeia lies along the Milky
Way and is rich in telescopic objects, including two from the
Messier list, both open clusters. These are M52 and M103. To find
M52 in the sky, look first to find the leftmost pair of stars
that form the first stroke of the ‘M’, when, as in December's
evening sky, Cassiopeia does resemble that letter. These two stars,
Schedar above and Caph below and to the left, point nearly directly
to the cluster, which is about the distance from Caph as Caph
is from Schedar. Nearby, half a degree to the southwest, is the
Bubble Nebula, NGC 7635. This object shows a complete spherical
shell of gas in large-instrument photographs.
Cassiopeia's position
within the Milky Way endows it with a good number of interesting
objects. In fact, of the 109 deep-sky targets that astronomer
Patrick Moore offers to extend the Messier list (Sky &
Telescope, December 1995) six are in this familiar constellation.
These six include the Bubble Nebula, open clusters NGC 457, 559,
and 663, and galaxies NGC 147 and 185. All these are listed as
brighter than magnitude 10, and so should be suited for observation
with moderate optics. And if you have a radio telescope, you can
look for the brightest object in the whole sky, the supernova
remnant Cassiopeia-A.