By Frank Cooper | 2025-01-24

The Golden Orion ...is Blue
On 01/25/2025 05:00 pm by PAOLO PALMA| Naples - Italy
Mosaics of one of the bluest area in the sky: Orions and his neighbors.
All the stars in the sky are coloured. And if we could see the pale shades of all those visible to the naked eye, the celestial vault would look like an immense explosion of coloured confetti.
But on closer inspection, alongside the many areas with stars of disordered hues, there are also areas with stars of very similar shades: when the creator began to paint the sky, it seems that he let a few drops of colour on the sky, which, like large and irregular patches of colour, ended up maculating the sky vault with blue and yellow.
This is what happens, for example, in that area on the border between the constellations of Orion, Lepus and Eridanus for blue; (and what occurs between those of Cetus and Pisces for yellow, ) as this mosaic show at a glance, with a total of over 110 stars, that is all those up to sixth magnitude, photographed one by one deliberately out of focus to better take their nuances.
These structures and concentrations of colours are not always the result of chance, because they can reveal physical truths about the age of the stars, their distance from each other, their position in our Galaxy and who knows what else. Most of these blue stars in fact belong for instance to the so-called Orion OB1 Star Association.
If these colours had been visible to the naked eye, the constellations would probably have had different SHAPES and BORDERS than they do today because they would certainly have been outlined following the DISTRIBUTION that these colours have in the celestial vault.
William Sadler Franks already realised this in the 19th century:
"colour is not uniformly distributed in the heavens, but tends to cluster in certain regions".
And when with the group of members of the Coloured Section of the BAA, the British Astronomical Association enjoyed describing the shades of all stars visible to the naked eye, counting the BLUE stars among the WHITE ones because of their pale appearance, he clearly added:
"the most striking aggregations of colour in the heavens are probably to be found in Taurus and Orion for the white stars; and in Cetus and Pisces for the yellow stars".
(Star colour, in Astronomy for Amateurs, 1888 p.265).
Golden Orion
That presented here is not the only monochromatic zone in the celestial vault, but it is certainly to be counted among the most obvious ones. Orion stands out because, due to its shape and bright stars, it is certainly the most beautiful constellation in the celestial vault.
Curiously, two thousand years ago, Virgil 'saw Orion armed with gold ( armatumque auro circumspicit Oriona - Aeneid 3.517 )'; and so did Manilius when he defined it as 'golden ( Orion aureus - Astronomica 5.723)'.
Are we to think that in antiquity the stars of Orion were described by their yellow hues?
Manilius, in describing Orion, says that he is so brilliant that when he is above the horizon, like the Moon and the planets, he dims the light of the fainter stars that inhabit the celestial vault. And to do so he defines it as "aureus (golden)", a term that should therefore not be understood in the sense of "golden", as if its stars were of such a hue, but in the poetic meaning of "luminous", a common way in astronomical contexts.
Paraphrasing the words of the illustrious of the past then, today we can poetically state that the Golden Orion is BLUE and blue are also many stars that surround his right foot.
More info: https://shorturl.at/BHxg0
Mosaics of more 200 single shots ( one for every star). Skywatcher Dobsonian telescope 18" 285x and smartphone A5
Gimp