Welcome to the Astro minute, where we’re exploring the universe sixty seconds at a time. I’m Lauren Smyth, and today we’re looking into the face of a bull.



While enjoying crisp winter night skies, you may have noticed not far from the Pleiades a distinctive v-shaped group of stars. This is the Hyades open star cluster, the face of Taurus the Bull. The Hyades cluster contains hundreds of stars, and is one of the closest of over a thousand open clusters discovered so far in our Milky Way galaxy. The bull’s face is dominated by his fiery eye: the magnificent red-orange star Aldebaran, a red giant over five hundred times more luminous than our sun. Though they appear together in the “v,” the Hyades and Aldebaran are actually separated from each other by over eighty light-years.



To see this winter treat, look about halfway between Orion and the Pleiades for the v-shaped group of stars and bright Aldebaran. The eye alone can detect over a dozen stars in the cluster, and binoculars will reveal dozens more.



That’s your astro minute!