The Celestial Dragon

This miniature dipper is smaller, fainter and inverted from the Big Dipper, but if you live in or near the lights of a large city or have bright moonlight, you probably won’t be able to see it at all.

It’s between these two famous dippers that you will find the celestial dragon, a large and ancient constellation that appears nightly in the northern sky. It wraps itself around the north celestial pole and remains perpetually above the horizon for much of the Northern Hemisphere.

Look for its long string of stars that begins nearly between the Big Dipper’s pointer stars and Polaris. This end marks the tail of the dragon. Follow the string of stars upward until it snakes back down toward Polaris, where it makes another sharp turn and heads upward once again.

At the upper end of the sinuous, dragonlike body lies a group of four stars that forms the head of the dragon, but modern amateur astronomers refer to this shape as the “lozenge.”

One of the most interesting sights in Draco lies near the opposite end of the dragon. The third star up from its tail appears a medium-bright star called Thuban, whose name not coincidentally derives from an Arabic word meaning “dragon.”

Because of the 25,800-year wobble of our Earth’s axis, this star -- and not Polaris -- was the North Star some five millennia ago when the Egyptians were building pyramids. If we wait patiently for another few millennia, we’ll again see Polaris drift away from the north celestial pole and watch as Thuban takes its place again as the North Star -- a sort of back to the celestial future.

Now don’t start chuckling. I’m not