Gerald McCormack, Natural Heritage Trust
First published CI News 14 November 2020, updated
Pleiades detail and its passage across the Southern Hemisphere sky
The Matariki or Pleiades is a cluster of several hundred stars. To the naked-eye the nine brightest stars form a distinctive, eye-catching group with a glowing background, a bit larger than a Full Moon. People with dark-adapted eyes and excellent distance vision can see eight or nine stars, while most people report five or six.
Traditionally, some Polynesians used the dawn rising of Matariki as the signal marking the next lunar years, while others used the dusk rising as the signal.
