Errai

In Shakespeare’s play “Julius Caesar,” Caesar makes a bold proclamation: But I am constant as the northern star, / Of whose true-fix’d and resting quality / There is no fellow in the firmament. Caesar turned out to be not so constant, of course. And neither is the northern star. In fact, Earth sees a cycle of North Stars – a cycle that lasts for 26,000 years. The current North Star is Polaris. It stands almost due north. So from the northern hemisphere, all the other stars appear to wheel around it as Earth turns on its axis. But Polaris will slide away from that honored spot over the coming centuries. And about 1200 years from now, it’ll be replaced by Errai, in the constellation Cepheus the king. We go through a sequence of north stars because of a slow wobble in Earth’s axis – the result of the gravitational pull of the Sun and Moon. When you combine a star’s brightness and its proximity to true north, Polaris may be the best of them all. Errai appears only about a third as bright as Polaris, and it won’t get quite as close to due north. Even so, it will reign as the North Star for about 2,000 years, before passing the crown to another star in Cepheus. The king is high in the north at nightfall, to the upper right of Polaris. It looks like a child’s drawing of a house, although it’s upside down during the evening hours. Errai is the peak of the house’s roof – a future inconstant North Star. Script by Damond Benningfield