Orion

As we walked home from a neighbor's house the other evening, we looked up to see Orion, said to be

the most brilliant of the constellations and visible from every inhabited part of the Earth. As darkness descends, he clearly dominates the southeast sky. Three bright stars in line in the middle of a bright rectangle decorate Orion's belt, which point northward to the clusters of the Hyades and Pleiades of Taurus, and southward to the Dog Star Sirius.

Rigel, a "supergiant" star 36,000 times as bright as our sun, marks Orion's left foot. Betelgeuse, another supergiant, is in Orion's right oxter.

There are alternative ways to visualize Orion. From the Southern Hemisphere, Orion is oriented differently, and the belt and sword are sometimes called the Saucepan, or Pot in Australia. Orion's Belt is called Drie Konings (Three Kings) or the Drie Susters (Three Sisters) by Afrikaans speakers in South Africa, are referred to as les Trois Rois (the Three Kings) in Daudet's Lettres de Mon Moulin (1866). The appellation Driekoningen (the Three Kings) is also often found in 17th- and 18th-century Dutch star charts and seaman's guides.