A Winter Hexagon

One of my preoccupations these days – hexagons. This eco print hexagon made me think constellation.

I researched hexagonal constellation and came up with a Winter Hexagon of six stars, Capella, Aldebaran, Rigel, Sirius, Procyon and Pollux.

Capella is a star in the Auriga constellation. Aldebaran is a giant orange star in the constellation of Taurus. Rigel is in the Orion constellation. Sirius (the Dog Star) is in the constellation Canis Major. Procyon is in Canis Minor. Pollux is in the Gemini constellation and is a giant orange star.

This diagram of the Winter Hexagon includes a triangle, where the star Betelgeuse is the apex and Procyon and Sirius form the other two angles. Betelgeuse is a Red Giant – a dying star – and it’s reckoned it’ll go supernova (explode) quite soon. Don’t panic, soon is in a few hundred thousand years, a million at most.

That’s a lot of space conjured up into my two-inch hexagon. Here’s where it is now in an even bigger space; a sketchbook page. It’s a page from my Art House Co-op 2015 sketchbook, in the process of being patched together. Meeting the deadline of 31 March will be a close-run thing, as usual.

The theme I’m interpreting is Circa. I’m calling mine Circa: BCE. I’ve added a secret hexagon, irregular like the Winter Hexagon – a hexagon cut from a secondhand sari I bought a while back at my local Hare Krsna shop.