The Night Sky from Beaumes de Venise: 4 Spring

Lorenzo in Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice tells his girlfriend how “the floor of heaven is thick inlaid with patines of bright gold”. Not always - even in Provence!

I have on various recent visits to Beaumes de Venise struggled to get a good enough view of the stars to check out the constellations that are up there in Spring. Eventually the Mistral came to my rescue.

The Mistral

As visitors to Provence know well, the Mistral is the strong, mercifully intermittent, wind that comes down the Rhone valley from the north. When it’s at its most violent, you wonder when it’ll ever stop. But you have to remind yourself that it blows away the clouds and, in summer, helps cool the place down a bit. On my recent visit in April, it was doing its job, delivering a glorious cloudless sky - sunshine during the day followed by the kind of clear starry night that Lorenzo (or Shakespeare) must have had in mind.

Leo the Lion

The main constellation at this time of year is Leo the Lion. It’s not that easy to see as most of the stars are not among the brightest. But it does have a distinguishing feature - a group of stars that look like a sickle or, for those of us who aren’t farmers hacking our way through the undergrowth, a backwards question mark. They are the lion’s head.

Regulus

Lower down there is much the brightest star, Regulus, imagined to be one of the lion’s paws. Moving way the left, or the east, there is a triangular group of three stars that represent its backside and tail. The one furthest to the left is called Denebola, which derives from the Arabic for tail - as we discovered in the summer with Deneb, the tail of the swan.

Why no more?

We’ll come back to Leo, but why aren’t there more bright stars up there at this time?

You can’t see the Milky Way as it’s too close to the southern horizon. It’s down there, of course, but running along the horizon from east to west. It follows from this that when we look up at the sky, we are looking away from our galaxy - we are looking out into inter-galactic space. Hence not too many stars.

As you might expect, the benefit of this is that you should be able to see other galaxies. Sadly, to do so, you need modern, ultra-powerful telescopes. But astronomers have identified about a dozen galaxies, most located (when viewed by us, of course) under the Lion’s hind legs.

Back to the Lion King

One of the interesting things about Leo is that, although it seems to have a recognisable pattern which human beings for a few thousand years have thought looked like a lion, actually the stars that make up the constellation have absolutely nothing to do with each other. They are light years apart.

The brightest, Regulus, is massive, many times larger than our Sun, but only (if that’s the word I’m looking for) 85 light years away from us. The next one above it is even larger, maybe hundreds of times larger than the Sun. But it isn’t that easy to see. It hasn’t even been given a proper name. It’s just “Eeta Leonis”, meaning that it’s the seventh brightest star in Leo (“eeta” being Greek for seven). The reason, of course, is that it’s so far away - it’s over 2,000 light years away. The light started to come to us when the Romans were trying to sort out Hannibal. They say that, if Eeta Leonis was as close to us as the nearest stars, it would be so bright that we’d be able to see it during the daytime.

Lorenzo

All of the above makes us realise that we are miniscule in terms of our own galaxy, let alone the wider universe with all the billions of other galaxies. Many people, perhaps understandably, find this worrying. Let’s go back to what Lorenzo was telling his girlfriend and wonder at the beauty of it all.

Tony Herbert

22 April 2025