Berenice’s Stellar Hair

Ptolemy’s wife Berenice had her beautiful tresses ceremoniously clipped and laid out on the temple altar to present to Aphrodite, the Greek goddess of love and beauty (now seen in the western evening sky as the glistening planet Venus).

Later that evening, however, someone discovered that the hair was missing. To prevent a terrible panic, the astronomer Conon of Samos proclaimed that Aphrodite had graciously accepted the gift and that she had honored the beautiful hair with a place in the heavens.

And, sure enough, we can now see it there in the sky -- right where Aphrodite placed it so many centuries ago.

While the story of Berenice’s hair is old, the constellation itself is relatively new; in fact, it wasn’t even created until the 16th-century Danish astronomer Tycho Brahe sketched it on his sky maps.

The brightest star in this constellation is known as Beta Comae, about 1.5 times larger, and more than three times more luminous than our sun. It appears quite faint in our sky, however, since it lies nearly 30 light years away.

Today, astronomers recognize that Coma Berenices contains a star cluster visible as a hazy cloud of stars. If you have a dark, un-light-polluted sky, aim binoculars in its direction and you’ll easily see more than three dozen stars making up the beautiful open cluster known as the Coma Star Cluster. At a distance of 270 light years, this swarm is one of the nearest to Earth.

Though the constellation is small and faint, it is quite a fertile region for stargazers with optical help. At least eight galaxies beyond our own Milky Way appear in this direction, and all are well within range of small backyard telescopes.

During the next month or so, Coma