Looking south toward the horizon after 9 pm this month, there is an unmistakable single bright white star: Fomalhaut. Fomalhaut marks the mouth of the constellation of the southern fish. And it’s also the guide to what’s known as the ‘watery region” of the sky, because there are several other water-related constellations here, like the starry whale and the waterman.
This grouping of water-related constellations is prominent every year in November, and lends itself to an interesting bit of history that unfolded under these stars one Autumn nearly 200 years ago.
It was November, 1820. An 80-foot sperm whale attacked a whaling ship from Nantucket, Massachusetts, several hundred miles off the coast of South America. The attack inspired Herman Melville’s book “Moby Dick”, regarded as one of the greatest works of fiction ever published, and the bane of many a high school literature student!
Melville wrote: “Nor when… lifted by your subject, can you fail to trace out great whales in the starry heavens, and boats in pursuit of them…”
Melville wrote with the understanding that his words would be read aloud as entertainment, by candlelight or firelight.
So if you’re feeling it’s damp drizzly November in your soul, and you are disinclined to take to the seas, pull out a star map and a copy of Herman Melville’s “Moby Dick”, and take your own starry voyage into the watery region of the night, by candlelight.