184: Dog Days of Summer

It’s fall now, but we recorded this episode during the dog days of August. The sky wore a blanket of wildfire smoke and daytime lows were in the mid 90s. All that heat got Amy thinking about the reason why we call these hot days, dog days. We love a good phrase origin story.

Sirius, also called Alpha Canis Majoris or the Dog Star, brightest star in the night sky, with apparent visual magnitude −1.46. It is a binary star in the constellation Canis Major. The bright component of the binary is a blue-white star 25.4 times as luminous as the Sun.

Barking dogs at the end by: Girlwithsoundrecorder on FreeSound CC0