Just the other night, the Crankee Yankee and I were driving around dusk. We noticed a winking star in the sky, and we also noticed that it flashed red and green. So we thought it might be a plane or <insert spooky music here> something else…perhaps an observer from another planet?
We have had discussions over the years about aliens, outer space, and whether or not we humans had assistance from unearthly beings who may have helped us on our way. We often talk about the pyramids, Stonehenge, the Easter Island figures, and much more. We believe that we probably had help from others more advanced than we were at that time in history. We also believe that there must be many other sentient beings on other planets as well. It’s all fascinating.
We were pretty intrigued with the winking star, and, as we both are interested in things like this, we looked up what this interesting something might be. Turns out that what we saw was a star named Capella. I looked up the information about Capella on EarthStar. Here it is:
“Capella is the brightest star we see at night of the same spectral type, or color, as our daytime star, the sun.
Like our sun, Capella appears as a yellow or golden star. It is the brightest yellow star visible in our sky – much bigger and brighter than our sun in absolute terms, but of course much farther away, about 42 light-years in contrast to the sun’s 8 light-minutes.”
“Science of star Capella. Like so many stars that appear single to the eye, Capella actually consists of two stars. Capella A and Capella B, as they’re called, are similar to each other, both roughly 10 times the sun’s diameter. They emit about 80 and 50 times more overall light than the sun, respectively. Another component to this system, a binary of small red stars, orbits about a light-year away.”
“Capella is the brightest star in a five-sided star pattern, which we know as the constellation Auriga the Charioteer. Capella is the Latin word for ‘nanny goat,’ and this lovely star is often called the Goat Star.”
Pretty cool, isn’t it? It certainly gladdened our little alien conspiracy-theoried hearts!