Second Star to the Right

“Standing at a window with their arms around each other [Dick and Dorothy] stared down with misty eyes at the very faint green star, which was rapidly decreasing in brilliance as the Skylark increased its already inconceivable velocity. Finally, it disappeared altogether.”

Gamma Andromedae

     Some years back at a HAL (Howard Astronomical League) star party, a rather heated discussion arose on the subject of green stars. I was observing Gamma Andromedae, a.k.a. Almach (or even Almaak), a spectacularly beautiful multiple star system in the constellation Andromeda. To the naked eye, it appears normal enough, but when seen through a telescope, it resolves itself into a bright yellow star accompanied by a somewhat dimmer companion of uncertain color. To my eye, that “uncertain” color is bright green. Others might perceive it as blue, yellow, gold, or even gray. So anyway, a fellow stargazer wandered over and asked what I was looking at. I told him, and explained that Almach was one of my favorite stars, because there were so few green stars “up there”. Another club member overheard this, and loudly interjected that there were no such things as green stars. My friend, who by this time was gazing through my eyepiece, answered, “Well, here’s one!” Apparently, his eye worked the same way as mine.

Another view of Gamma Andromedae

     Before long there was a line at my telescope of people wanting to weigh in on the controversy themselves. But no two people could agree on what they were seeing, and it wasn’t long before the debate turned into something of an argument (which continued via e-mail for several days afterwards). Part of the problem is that the question “Are there such things as green stars?” has no easy answer. If you define a star as being green by where its luminosity peaks on the visible light spectrum, then our own Sun qualifies as one! But peaking in the green means that the adjacent colors are nearly as strong, so the resultant color is as close to white as one can get. But complicating things is how the human eye perceives color. A lot depends on context – the color of what is next to the object we are observing can influence how our brain processes what we are seeing. This is why there are in fact many stars out there that appear green in the eyepiece (but never in photographic images) – and in every case they are the dimmer members of a multiple star system.

     So it’s interesting that Smith chose to describe the sun of the world (Osnome) his heroes had spent so much time on as green. I believe it was something of an inside joke to his readers, letting them in on the fun he was having, inventing imaginary worlds. Taken that way, traveling to a green star is the equivalent of journeying to Neverland, an acknowledgement that we are in the realm of fantasy.

     At this point, Smith closes the first book of the Skylark trilogy by returning Seaton and company to Earth. What ought to have been an epic journey (they are, after all, halfway across the galaxy) turns out to be as dull as dishwater (“The return voyage through space was uneventful.”), the only incident of any significance being the escape of Marc Duquesne just minutes before landing outside Washington, D.C. (Sequel!) But as we will learn from the very opening lines of Skylark Three, the saga is only beginning!