Although spring officially arrived just over a week ago, we can still partake of many of the bright stars of the wintertime season. At around 8:30 p.m. local time, over toward the west and south, our early evening sky is strewn with brilliant constellations and outstanding deep-sky objects.

Standing upright, high up in the west are the Gemini twins, a constellation that rewards a great deal of exploration.

The expression, "By Jimminy!" is a popular corruption of the swearing of the ancients by these patrons, as in "by Gemini."

The brothers have figured in scores of ancient folk tales. They were adventurers, warriors, and famous navigators.

The stars that compose their arms and bodies are fainter than those in their heads and feet. A second magnitude star known as Alhena marks one of Pollux feet. In places where light pollution hides many of the fainter stars only Pollux, Castor and Alhena may be visible, forming a long wedge with its point aimed straight at Orion, the Mighty Hunter.

Zeta Geminorum is a pulsating star which astronomers catagorize as a Cepheid variable. Such stars have the abilty to change their intrinsic brightness; they pulsate like a baloon that is alternately inflated and deflated. Although mystery still surrounds them, astronomers have used Cepheids as cosmic measuring sticks to help tell us how far away globular clusters and neighboring galaxies are from us.

Zeta normally shines at magnitude 4.4 (by most standards, a moderately dim naked eye star for people with reasonably dark skies). It goes through a full pulsation cycle in about 10 days, during which time it fades to one-half of its normal brightness, then brightens up once again.

Propus is a complex system, a visual binary of magnitudes 3.3 and 6.5, whose stars appear to rotate about each other over a time span of about 500 years; the brighter member is a semi-regular variable, taking an average of 233 days to fade, brighten and fade again. Additionally, an unseen companion star also periodically eclipses this star at intervals of 2,983 days.

Just above and to the right of Propus lies number 35 in Charles Messiers catalogue. Located just off the trailing foot of Castor, M35 can just be seen with the unaided eye on dark transparent nights.

In low-power binoculars it may look like a dim, fairly large unresolved interstellar cloud, but look again. Even through light-polluted suburban skies, 7x glasses reveal at least a half dozen of the clusters brightest stars against the whitish glow of about 200 fainter ones.

M35 has been described as a "splendid specimen" whose stars appear in curving rows, reminding one of the bursting of a skyrocket. Walter Scott Houston (1912-1993) who wrote the Deep-Sky Wonders column in Sky & Telescope magazine for nearly half a century called M35 "one of the greatest objects in the heavens; a superb object that appears as big as the Moon and fills the eyepiece with a glitter of bright stars from center to edge."

Also located less than half a degree southwest from M35 is an unusual object that has brought a brief surge of excitement to countless numbers of amateurs over the years. In a 6-inch telescope, its a faint, circular cloud of light, which initially appears to the uninitiated as a possible new comet. The object, in fact, is the faint open star cluster NGC 2158.

The compilers of many of the more popular star atlases had to draw a cutoff line as to what deep sky objects to include, and not to include. In other words, what is the faintest nebula, star cluster or galaxy that a particular star atlas would catalog? Unfortunately, NGC 2158 was just a bit too faint to be included in many of the more popular atlases which probably explains why many amateur astronomers have grown up knowing nothing of it.

Houston himself fell into this trap, later calling NGC 2158 his "lasting monument to my early, somewhat careless, years of observing."

I myself am not embarrassed to relate this personal episode: In September 1985, while camping in the Adirondacks of northern New York, I was scanning the Orion-Gemini region looking for two periodic comets, Halley and Giacobini-Zinner. I, too, stumbled across NGC 2158.

For a long time I thought I was looking at a new discovery, "Comet Rao," but after composing myself and checking Volume Two of Burnhams Celestial Handbook, I came back down to Earth. Hopefully a bona fide "Comet Rao" may yet be discovered someday, but I certainly won't be mistaking NGC 2158 for a new comet anytime soon!