Subaru

Astronomy is one of my interests. I own a telescope and subscribe to Sky & Telescope.

The August issue of Sky & Telescope arrived and I was reading it last night. During my read, I came across references to the Subaru Telescope in Hawaii. I never heard of it and since I own a Subaru, I wondered if the folks that built my car had anything to do with the telescope. Did they help fund it or what?

Wrong!

According to Wikipedia, "Subaru Telescope (In Japanese: すばる望遠鏡) is the 8.2 metre flagship telescope of the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan, located at the Mauna Kea Observatory on Hawaii. It is named after the open star cluster known in English as the Pleiades."

Well, that cleared up the matter.

By the way, I already knew that Subaru was Japanese for the Pleiades, which was the inspiration for the cool Subaru logo. But I wondered why there were only six stars in the logo, whereas the Pleiades was famous for its "Seven Sisters" stars.

Wikipedia solved that mystery, too. The six stars in the logo allude to the six companies that merged to create Fuji Heavy Industries, the transportation conglomerate whose automobile division is Subaru.