Dog Days

What do you think of when you think of summer?  I think of sunny warm days and spending a lot of time outside.  I also remember as a kid not having any air conditioning in our house.  Because of that, we suffered through a lot of very hot days and humid nights.  I remember my mom referred to these times as “the dog days of summer.”  I never knew what that meant.  I knew there was an old movie called “Dog Day Afternoon.”  Since I had no idea what the movie was about, I always thought the “dog days of summer” had to do with some old movie.

Years later, when I was in college one of my professors shared a similar story about the term “dog days of summer.”  To my surprise I learned that the term had nothing to do with an old movie but rather dealt with a Star in the constellation Canis Major that is one of the brightest stars in the sky and is approximately 8.6 light-years distant from Earth. The Dog days is named after Sirius, the Dog Star. The Dog days come when the Dog Star begins to line up with our Sun (lining up is called conjunction). It was thought long ago that when the Dog Star aligned with the Sun that they combined their energy to make the weather even hotter. Of course, we now know that no Star would warm the earth at even the smallest fraction that the Sun does since stars are very far away.

However, the term stuck. In July and August the background of stars beyond the Sun includes the Dog Star Sirius. In July and August during a persistent heat wave, do not be surprised to hear, “we are in the Dog days of summer.”