Zubeneschamali? Zubenelgenubi? (astronomy series)

Near the end of the long spur of Forest Road 271 in Park County. The 4x4 trail is steep here, if you feel unsafe, do not continue!

Zubeneschamali and Zubenelgenubi are the two brightest stars is the constellation of Libra.

Interesting thing about their names, though: they mean “The Tip of the Northern Claw” and “The tip of the Southern Claw”.

Libra has claws?

Well, nor exactly. A long, long time ago, the sky was broken up into sections, each corresponding to a season. Wait, that’s backwards.

Our night time sky has stars- billions of them. Granted our eyes only see a few thousand of them on any given night, but with a little imagination and some time, people can make out shapes among those stars that we do see. One famous shape looks like a tea-pot (Sagittarius). One looks like one of those shower nozzles with a long hose and hot water spraying out all over . The island of Nantucket is there, as seen from space (Capricorn) - the list goes on and on.

The showerhead and spray once made up the constellation of Scorpius. Scorpius was huge, taking up a big section of the southern sky in the summertime. The Romans didn’t like this, they thought the sky, or the zodiac in this case, should be 12 evenly spaced constellations. So rather than just accept that Scorpius was larger than the others, they chopped the claws off the scorpion in their pictures. And named the claw parts “Libra”, the scales.

But they never changed the names of the stars in Libra.

Lots of signal bounce here. Cache is a cammoed PB jar. You may want to hike down from above; the 4x4 trail is steep and rocky here (at least too steep and rocky for us- our vehicle lacks skid-plates) Originally I thought this science series would be a power trail, but things being the way things are, these astronomy-themed caches are not very power-trail-ish. Instead, the first half can be found along Lake George’s Forest Rd 271. This is a 4x4 trail; please do not attempt with a regular car! Terrain and difficulty ratings are for people who drive to the cache locations; if you hike or mountain bike, of course the D/Ts will be different.

Congrats to jherber: not only for the FTF, but for the common sense when caching alone!