Some of the winter’s most striking constellations can be admired in the southern sky this month. The star clusters of Taurus are excellent binocular objects. The heavenly Bull carries on its back the sparkling triangle of the Pleiades, the Seven Sisters of the Greeks and Romans, and in reality a mass of relatively young stars about 440 light-years away. Their light left them in 1580, when Sir Francis Drake completed his circumnavigation of the world. The V-shaped cluster of the Hyades, 150 light-years away, adorns the Bull’s head, its red eye the giant star Aldebaran.
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