Matariki – Summerstargazing in New Zealand
Did you know that Matariki is visible in the New Zealand summer sky? In the above image it’s visible to the left of the stargazer’s head.
Many people in New Zealand think that it’s best to view Matariki in winter, when we celebrate Matariki as a holiday, but in winter this open star cluster is visible in the predawn sky. If you are a night owl, like us, you may prefer to watch it in summer. And there is plenty of time for that! This beautiful cluster is visible in the Southern Hemisphere evening sky from October, when it peeps over the horizon at the end of our Experiences, to the end of April. We would love to show you where to look.
Matariki is a group of more than 800 stars located more than 400 light-years from Earth in the constellation Taurus and west of Orion (the constellation that contains “The Pot”). In this YouTube video, you can zoom in on Matariki and see the group with increasing magnitude.
This stellar object is also known in the rest of the world by names such as the “Seven Sisters”, Subaru and Messier 45 and its English name Pleiades comes from a Greek legend.
In Greek mythology, the Pleiades are the seven daughters of the Titan god Atlas and the ocean nymph Pleione. Atlas rebelled against Zeus, king of the gods, in an ancient war Zeus sentenced Atlas to forever having to hold up the heavens. The sisters were so upset to lose their father, that Zeus gave them a place in the sky to be close to him.
The Matariki stars together form an open star cluster — a group of stars born around the same time from the same gigantic cloud of gas and dust. The brightest stars in this cluster were formed in the last 100 million years, and are glowing blue. These very bright stars will burn out fast, and their life span is expected to be only a few hundred million years, much shorter than the approximately 11 billion years our Sun is expected to live.
If you’d like to know more about Matariki in New Zealand, as well as many other celestial objects visible from our beautiful island location, we’d love to tell you during one of our summer Look up and Get Lost stargazing experiences, which you can Book here.
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