Empyreal Pleiades Greetings

The seven sisters’ supernal sight was by sailors stellarly prized in legendary dove-likened flight, catasterism immortalized. As mythical frieze empyreal they appear in stargazers’ view of the Pleiades ethereal fleeing in misty byways blue. They’ve lent the cosmos fabled luster ever since by the ancients found being the nearest open cluster astrally gravitation bound. The firmament they loftily graced brightly seen in nocturnal skies as by Orion the nymphs were chased in their sidereal disguise. Tennyson wrote that these stars of night while ‘rising through the mellow shade’ glitter like a swarm of firefly light ‘entangled in a silver braid’. Did Yeats mean the sisters as ‘Seven Lights’ that ‘bowed in their dance and wept’? Here the Pleiades serve as leaven to raise our hearts where hopes have slept. When we are weary of worldly woes, with pensive gaze turned overhead perhaps in joy we’ll behold where those celestial Pleiades still tread and hear the heavens and nature sing in these times of holiday cheer, as yearnings for peace on earth take wing with our dreams for the coming year… ~ Harley White * * * * * * * * * Perhaps the most famous star cluster on the sky, the Pleiades is a young star cluster known for its seven brightest stars, called the Seven Sisters. In both myth and science, the Pleiades are considered to be sibling stars. Modern astronomers say the Pleiades stars were born from the same cloud of gas and dust some 100 million years ago. This gravitationally bound cluster of several hundred stars looms some 430 light-years distant, and these sibling stars drift through space together at about 25 miles per second. Many of these Pleiades stars shine hundreds of times more brightly than our sun.