Legend

Hercules is one of the most famous of all Greek heroes. He was a demi-god — his father was the god Zeus and his mother was a human. The goddess Hera, Zeus' wife, raised Hercules, but when she discovered that he was not her son, she became enraged. After Hercules was married, Hera made him go mad, and he killed his wife and children. To atone for this great sin, Hercules had to perform twelve nearly impossible tasks. Some of these tasks involved other constellations visible in the night sky: he strangled the Nemean lion, represented by the Leo; he killed the Lernean hydra, represented by Hydra, and he crushed a crab, represented by Cancer.

If you look at Hercules on a very dark night, you might just make out a small fuzzy blob between two of its stars. This is the great Hercules Globular Cluster, a group of 500 000 very old stars about 22 000 light years away. In the 1970s, astronomers used a radio telescope to beam a message towards this globular cluster. Don't wait up for an answer, though — it will take another 21 970 years for the message to get there, and another 22 000 years for any reply to come back!

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