Late last night -- or very early in the morning depending on how you might look at it -- I was about to capture three really good night sky photos.
In my first photo, I was able to capture most of the major stars of the Constellation Scorpius The Scorpion just above the tree line to the south. The Waning Gibbous Moon can be seen right next to the constellation's brightest star, Antares (also known as the Heart of the Scorpion).
My second photo is a wider shot showing our beautiful Luna, the visible stars of Scorpius The Scorpion, and the interesting asterism known as "The Teapot" which is a part of the larger Constellation Sagittarius The Archer. The last photo is a close-up photo of the features of the Waning Gibbous Moon and the bright star, Antares.
Antares is the 15th brightest star visible in our night sky and lies about 550 light-years (or 170 parsecs) from our Solar System. Its also nearly 10,000 times as bright as our own Sun.
While Antares appears to be a single star when viewed with the naked eye here on Earth, but it's actually a binary star system, with two components called Alpha Scorpii A and Alpha Scorpii B. The brighter of the pair (a Scorpii A) is the red supergiant star that we can see, while the fainter star is a hot white main sequence star similar to our own Sun which is classified as a G-type main sequence star. Both stars are believed to be separated by about 529 AUs.
The name Antares comes from a Greek phrase meaning "the rival of Ares" (or in this case, the rival of the planet Mars) and was probably given because of the star’s red-orange color and brightness similar to that of our small, red planetary neighbor. Unlike Mars however, Antares is very large, with an estimated radius of around 800 million miles (or 8.6 AUs). So large that, if it were replaced with our own Sun, Antares would envelop all the inner planets of our Solar System!
Well I hope y'all enjoyed this presentation and my photographs. Have a wonderful Dixie day and y'all come back now, ya hear!
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