The second brightest star adorning Leo is Denebola, which flashes on the end of his tail. Denebola is 10 times as bright as our sun and is 25 light years away. Since Regulus, on the heart of the Lion, is 99 light years distant and Denebola, on the tail of the Lion, is only 25 light years, science has certainly played havoc with the poor Nemean lion. Proctor tells us that Coma Berenices (Berenice's Hair) was originally the tuft of the tail of the lion when the constellation was pictured in the maps as being more extended. This was quite an appropriate place for the sparkles and gleams of these fine, tiny stars. It is likely that it would have still been the tuft on the Lion's tail if a clever Alexandrian astronomer had not found it necessary to use his wits quickly and call it Berenice's Hair to please the vanity of an Egyptian Queen. The apparent center for the November meteors, or "shooting stars," which appear about the 15th of the month, are within the curve of the Sickle of Leo near the star Gamma. [Figure 50] The apparent paths of shooting stars when projected backward meet at a point called the radiant point. It looks from the diagram as if these meteors all came from one fixed place in the sky but the effect would also be the same if we saw, for instance, seventeen trains racing along seventeen tracks laid parallel across a desert from a point on the distant horizon. They would all seem to start from this point and widen out as they approached the observer, the effect in perspective, the widening apart from a point, being the same in the case of the meteors speeding along parallel lines in space. We see only those meteors, of course, which become caught and ignited in the atmosphere surrounding the earth and which streak down the sky all aflame; the rest pass on their way, invisible. Of this more will be said later under the heading of "Comets and Meteors." The "Leonids," as these November meteors are called, are only seen in the early morning hours on the 15th of November, while the "Andromids," which have their radiant point in Andromeda, are only seen in the early part of the evening on the 24th of November.