The constellation Orion

The constellation Orion

Orion is a constellation of the northern hemisphere. It is considered the most beautiful of all constellations, because it has a relatively large number of bright stars. Its brightest star, β Orionis, bears the Arabic name Rigel (foot of the giant). It is the seventh brightest star in the sky. The red supergiant Betelgeuse (α Orionis) shines at the shoulder of the giant. Its three stars ζ Orionis (Alnitak), ε Orionis (Alnilam) and δ Orionis (Mintaka) are particularly interesting. They form the belt of Orion and are visible to the naked eye. Below this belt there is a nebula, the famous Orion Nebula (M42), which represents the sword of the giant. It is a cloud of gas in which new stars are born. It is one of the most photographed objects in the sky and can already be observed with binoculars.

Mythology

Many legends tell of the hunter Orion. According to one account, he is said to have been the son of the sea god Poseidon. As an excellent hunter, he freed the island of Chios from wild animals. He fell in love with Merope, the daughter of the king, but she rejected him, and so one day Orion took her by force. As a punishment, her father blinded him. With the help of a boy, he then went east, because according to the prophecy of an oracle, the sunrise would give him back his sight. There he did indeed get his sight back, and Eos, the goddess of the dawn, fell in love with him. Artemis, the goddess of hunting, who was herself in love with Orion, envied Eos this love and shot him dead with an arrow. According to a second account, Artemis is said to have shot Orion by accident. She wanted to break her vow of chastity for him and marry him. However, her twin brother Apollo was against this union. One day, when Orion was swimming far out at sea, Apollo challenged her to prove her skill in archery by hitting a distant black dot on the waves. Artemis hit it and realised in horror that she had fatally wounded Orion. According to a third account, the sting of the scorpion is said to have caused the death of the hunter Orion, although the circumstances are told in different ways: either Orion came too close to Artemis against her will and she then sent the scorpion, or the earth goddess sent it because Orion claimed that he could kill every wild animal on Earth. Both versions agree that the two were afterwards placed in the sky. To this day, they avoid each other. Whenever Scorpius rises in the east, Orion disappears in the west. When Orion appears again in the east, Scorpius sets in the west.