The Astronomy book I gave you will explain most of the basics, and this blog will serve as supplemental material. If you have any questions you can email me and I will post the best possible answer. Lets start this blog with the constellation of the Twins, Castor and Pollux (also know as Gemini)and how they relate to St. Elmos Fire. The constellation Gemini lies between Taurus and Cancer. St. Elmo is the patron saint of sailors and was known to guide them to safety. It is the phenomena that appears as bright lights at the tips of the masts of ships,poles,trees and even leaves, but are actually plasma brought on by the highly charged particles in the atmosphere tearing apart air molocules and usually started as the results of the suns coronal discharge, volcanic activity, or a thunderstorm. Through out history it has appeared to many famous people and have been associated with Pliny the Elder, Shakespeare, Herman Melville, Julius Ceasar, Constantine, Megellan, Columbus,Charles Darwin and millions of people around the world. These lights are associated with superstitious beliefs throughout various cultures, like when they appeared on the spears of Ceasars 5th legion, Julius Ceasar saw them as an omen to heavenly intervention. When it appears a one light it is called Helen, and when it appears as two lights they are called Castor and Pollux. If you look up the Carrington event or the solar super storm of 1859 you will see that this was the largest solar storm in recorded history and if a similar storm was to hit today it would fry most of our modern day electronics and thereby sending people and our world economy into chaos. This was the event in which millions of people around the globe witnessed first hand the effects of a CME (Coronal Mass Ejection) from the sun on our atmosphere by manifesting itself as Aurorea and St. Elmo's Fire. Aurorae even appeared in the equator which is rarely seen.
Now lets delve ito the actual stars. Sometimes when you see a star it appears as a bright dot in the sky , but peer into a telescope and it will reveal itself as having been more than one star, get an even more powerful scope and the will appear as even more stars. Sometimes the stars are so close together that no powerful telescope can distinguish their separation and that is where Spectroscopy will reveal these binary stars or eclipsing stars, and by checking the changing light spectrum we can tell if there is something passing in front of them. This would be like when you put your hand in front of a faint light on a candle in a very dark room, I cant see your hand in the dark but I know it is moving in front of the candle when I cant see the light. The star of Castor is an Orange Giant 34 light years from earth is just that, a star so far away that the light appears as one bright star when viewed with the naked eye. Castor can be seen through a telescope as a Visual Binary, but each of those stars have a companion star only revealed through spectronomy, so it is a quadruple star system, (two spectroscopic Binary stars). But wait if we look closer there is another faint star nearby gravitationally bound to these and it is an Eclipsing Binary , so now its a sextuplet star system . Recently through spectral analysis Pollux has been is confirmed to have an extrasolar planet.
Here is a little information on the origins of the constellation itself. Castor and Pollux were twin sons of Leda and Zeus/Tyndareus and brothers of Helen of Troy and Clytemnestra and half-brothers of Timandra, Phoebe, Heracles, and Philonoe. Pollux's father was Zeus and Castor's was Tyndareus. The chinese thought of Castor as Ying and Pollux as Yang as in the Ying/Yang Philosophy which is a state of being where everything is made equal by opposing forces and from which all things depend. This is like the battle between good and evil, light and dark, and positive and negative forces.
Will we see more of St. Elmo Fire during the next solar maximum of 2013. Maybe we will, so keep that camera ready to record the dazzling array of dancing lights or will your digital camera even work? See also Will-o-the Wisp, Ball Lightning , Foo Fighters, Naga Fireballs, Hessdalen Lights Red Sprites, Marfa Lights.Ball Lightning as a primordial mini black hole.
