VV(18): Sirius

[David Morris]

http://ourworld.compuserve.com/homepages/bmoler/dognight.htm

Everyone's heard of the dog days of summer, those hot days of July and 
August. It was thought by the ancients that the Dog Star, Sirius, supposedly 
augmented the sun's heat to produce those hot days. Sirius is not so hot by 
itself as it shines like a cold diamond in the bone chilling cold night sky 
of winter.

To the Egyptians this bright star was Sothis, whose heliacal rising in June 
announced the flooding of the Nile and the beginning of their agricultural 
year. A heliacal rising is a star or planet's first appearance in the dawn 
sky after leaving the evening sky.

Sirius' rank as the brightest night time star is due mainly to its closeness 
to the earth. It is 8.6 light years away.

The companion to Sirius was discovered indirectly in the first half of the 
19th century by F. W. Bessel. Sirius and its companion orbit about their 
mutual center of gravity causes Sirius to move across the sky in a wavy 
path. Sirius B was the first of a new class of stars discovered, white 
dwarfs. Here is a star with the mass of the sun, only twice the diameter of 
the earth. It is a star which has run out of hydrogen in its core, 
succumbing to the force of gravity which has squeezed it down to this small 
size.

http://www.angelfire.com/stars2/dreams2real/sirius.html

Sirius (Alpha Canis Majoris) is the brightest star in the sky, blazing at an 
obvious magnitude of -1.43. Sirius was represented in ancient Egypt as a 
five-pointed star. This icon is may be seen on the walls of the famous 
Temple of Isis/Hathor at Denderah. The Egyptians sometimes set the star in 
front of a circular disk which represented the Sun, to depict the heliacal 
rising of Sirius. A disk with a star before it (sometimes placed between two 
horns) was the symbol for Isis/Hathor.
Sirius is located in the constellation of Canis Major, "the Great Dog.". 
This constellation, along with Canis Minor, are the two hunting dogs of the 
great hunter, Orion.

SIRIUS IN ANCIENT TIMES:
Sirius has long been associated with the great celestial dog. In ancient 
Egypt, Canis major was seen as Anubis, the dog or jackel-headed son/god of 
Isisand Osiris, who assisted in the passage of souls into the underworld, 
and weighed the hearts of those who died, to determine their quantity of the 
departed's good versus evil deeds. Perhaps nowhere has Sirius enjoyed a more 
regal history, than in ancient Egypt, where Sirius was the Star of Queen 
Isis. Here the star was associated with the great mother goddesses Isis, and 
her earlier archetype, Hathor. Sirius was the Nile Star. At approximately 
2500 BCE, the time the Great Pyramid was constructed, Sirius would rise just 
before the sun, on the Summer Solstice, (the first day of summer, the 
longest day of the year, the day when the noon sun stood highest above the 
horizon). This is known as the "heliacal rising," after the Greek word 
Helios for Sun). 2500 years later, during Egypts Ptolemaic Period, Sirius 
would rise before the Sun approximately 2 weeks after the summer solstice.



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