Dog Days
Today is hot and humid, as summer is wont to be here in New Jersey. It’s only June, and it feels like early August: muggy enough to make everyone irritable, muggy enough to make you feel like a glazed apple that’s been left in the sun too long, muggy enough to punish any physical activity with a headache. I’ve been riding the edge of one all day. If the long-term forecast is to be believed, we can expect a lot more days just like this, or worse; it’s supposed to be an unusually hot, wet summer.
On days like this, my mind keeps turning to the phrase “the dog days of summer,” like an 8-track that’s been interrupted many times, then left to run, or an iPod set to mix: I can think anything I want in any order, but periodically, I return to rehearsing “the dog days of summer.” A song I can’t really get out of my head.
I’d like to get it out of my head because the phrase never made much sense to me. No, that’s not true. It did make sense to me, once, but I was wrong.
As a little kid, I’d hear the phrase at the height of summer heat, late July to mid-August, and always thought of a hot, panting, thoroughly miserable dog, overheated because it couldn’t take off its fur coat the way humans can. I long figured “the dog days of summer” were so named because it made people feel like dogs, too beaten down by heat to do much of anything but lie in the shade and pant.
I don’t remember when I learned that “the dog days of summer” have nothing to do with actual dogs, but with astronomy, something to do with Sirius (the dog star) and/or canis major (the big dog), the constellation of which Sirius is part, a little below and to the left of Orion.
Which doesn’t make any sense to me, either. Canis major is part of the winter group, so named because it’s visible in the early night-time hours (when people look at the stars) during the winter. As the earth orbits the sun, different parts of the surrounding sky become visible, lying on the other side of the earth from the sun. So for a while, I figured the sun must be passing through canis major at the height of summer, while the summer group—opposite the sun as measured from earth—was visible at night.
But that doesn’t make any sense, either. The sun travels about the ecliptic plane. Technically, the earth orbits in the ecliptic plane, region defined by planetary orbits, which more-or-less lie within a single plane, but from the viewpoint of earth, we sit still and the sun moves about, so in the context of primitive astronomy and folklore, the sun travels the ecliptic. The ecliptic, by no coincidence, comprises the twelve signs of the zodiac; the zodiac is significant precisely because those are the constellations through which the planets (including the zodiacal “planets” of the sun and moon) pass. Canis minor isn’t on that list, and the sun never passes through it. Leo, Cancer, or Gemini, yes, but not the big dog.