Orion

The story the Greeks told

First, the honest part. These stars were always there. People have looked up at this exact pattern for tens of thousands of years, long before anyone gave it a name. The hunter is not really up there. What the Greeks did, like every culture before and since, was join the brightest dots into a figure and hang a story on it. The stars are real. The man is a story. Here is theirs.

Orion was a giant and the greatest hunter alive, said to be a son of the sea god Poseidon. The Greeks could never agree on how he died, which is very Greek of them. In one telling he boasted that he would hunt down every animal on Earth, so Gaia, the Earth herself, sent a scorpion that stung him dead. In another, the goddess Artemis loved him, and her brother Apollo, who did not approve, tricked her into shooting him with her own arrow from far across the sea.

Either way, the Greeks said grief is what set him among the stars, a hunter forever, with his dogs at his heels and his prey in front of him. They placed the scorpion up there too, but on the far side, which is the part that is genuinely true to the sky: Orion really does sink below the western horizon at the very moment Scorpius rises in the east. They are never up at the same time. A real quirk of the sky, wrapped in a story to explain it.

How to find it

Orion is a winter constellation north of the equator, best from December to March in the evening, and a summer one south of it, where he hangs upside down. Face roughly south and look for three bright stars in a short, evenly spaced, straight line. That is the Belt, and nothing else in the sky looks quite like it.

From the Belt you can find everything nearby. The bright red star up and to the left is Betelgeuse, his shoulder. The brilliant blue-white star down and to the right is Rigel, his foot. Follow the line of the Belt down and left and you arrive at Sirius, the brightest star in the sky. Follow it up and right and you reach the orange eye of Taurus the bull. Just below the Belt hangs his sword, a short smudge of stars that holds the Orion Nebula, a glowing cloud where new stars are being born right now.

A sky full of borrowed names

Orion is a perfect example of how names in the sky stack up. The figure is Greek. The three belt stars, Alnitak, Alnilam and Mintaka, are Arabic. Betelgeuse and Rigel are Arabic too. If you want the whole story, read where star names come from.