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Updated: July 15, 2025
The cloud-like aspect of large parts of the Galaxy must always have attracted attention, even from naked-eye observers, but the true star-clouds were first satisfactorily represented in Barnard's photographs. The resemblance to actual clouds is often startling. Some are close-packed and dense, like cumuli; some are wispy or mottled, like cirri.
This is the naked-eye estimate of the star-population of the heavens; but if instead of relying on unaided vision, you get the assistance of a little telescope, you will be astounded at the enormous multitude of stars which are disclosed. An ordinary opera-glass or binocular is a very useful instrument for looking at the stars in the heavens.
Thus if Sirius were to collide with some other space traveler and be knocked into smithereens as an Irishman would say, we would not know about it for eight years. In fact if all the stars were blotted out and only the sun left we should still behold their light in the heavens and be unconscious of the extinction of even some of the naked-eye stars for sixty or seventy years.
Naked-eye stuff, too! I wonder if anybody ever saw that before!" "Not likely," said Joe. Mike stared out a port. Haney looked, also. "How're we going to get back, Joe?" "The Moonship has rockets on board," Joe told him. "Only they can't stick them in the firing-racks outside. They're stowed away, all shipshape, Navy fashion.
But Heis, who saw more naked-eye stars than Argelander, makes Ursa Major precisely equal to Hercules in the number of stars, his enumeration showing two hundred and twenty-seven in each constellation, while, according to him, Draco follows very closely after, with two hundred and twenty stars.
Yet, on account of the minuteness of the majority of their stars, neither of these constellations makes by any means as brilliant a display as does Orion, to which Argelander assigns only one hundred and fifteen naked-eye stars, and Heis one hundred and thirty-six.
Three-quarters of the naked-eye stars are in the giant stage, which comprises such familiar objects as Betelgeuse, Antares, and Aldebaran, but most of them are much denser than these greatly inflated bodies. The pinnacle is reached in the intensely hot white stars of the helium class, in whose spectra the lines of this gas are very conspicuous.
No astronomer who happens to be engaged in this part of the sky ever fails, unless his attention is absorbed by something of special interest, to glance at beta Libræ, which is famous as the only naked-eye star having a decided green color. The hue is pale, but manifest. Is the slight green tint perceptible in Sirius variable? I am sometimes disposed to think it is.
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