A Folk Tale

There once lived a beautiful Princess in a castle in the clouds, the daughter of the powerful Sky King and Queen. The Princess sat at her loom every day, weaving the cloth of the rainbows and gazing out her window to see the best places in the sky to place her beautiful cloth. It happened one day that she saw a Herdsman far below one day as she looked to cast out her cloth and immediately fell in love with him. She left her castle in the clouds with her work unfinished to meet the Herdsman.

The Sky Queen was very proud of her daughter's work, and very jealous of her daughter's time. When she found that her daughter had left the heavens for a man on earth, she called the Princess back up into the sky and locked her in the castle far away from the herdsman. But the Sky King took pity on the lovers and brought the Herdsman to his kingdom so the two could be nearer each other. To appease his wife and to keep his daughter weaving the rainbows, he placed a river between the Herdsman and the Princess so they may never truly be together. However, it is said that once in a year, blackbirds and magpies are allowed to fly up to the sky and make a bridge across the Milky Way to let the two lovers, called Vega and Altair by us, come across and meet each other. If there is a rainbow in the sky that day, the Princess has thrown her weaving away early, in a rush to meet her love before the sun sets and the bridge disappears.

The image below is a picture of the summer triangle take by the Hubble. The two bright stars on either side of the Milky Way are Vega, above it, and Altair, below it. Vega is in the constellation of Lyra the harp, for the more curious of you, and Altair in Aquilla the Eagle. The other star, the third brightest in the picture, looks like it's leading the Milky Way forward. It's Deneb, in the constellation of Cygnus, the only summer constellation besides Ursa Major and Ursa Minor I can point out with any reliability. If you look at the photo for a second, you'll see two stars above and below the Milky Way near Deneb, and three stars in an almost line pointing right. They're the arms of the Northern Cross, the rest of Cygnus the Swan.



There's a river between me and my Love. Maybe the world put it there, maybe I did, maybe it's been there and I keep on running back across it because life on the other side isn't as easy as I thought it would be. Somebody back in the day linked up a bunch of stars together in their mind and called it Cygnus. There's a black hole in that part of the sky- I've looked at its noise with a radio telescope. That black hole got the constellation stuck in my mind and I think it's wonderful how a week of research a summer ago and a Japanese and Chinese fable told to me a week ago serve to keep it always in my mind that there's a cross in the middle of the Milky Way, when I have such a tendency to forget that it's been in the river all along.