Good evening, fellow stargazers!
On the evening of Tuesday, February 20th, I captured this really clear shot of our lovely Moon near the twin stars: Castor and Pollux -- the two main stars of the Constellation Gemini The Twins -- along with the other nearby winter stars and their constellations.
The first is the original photo taken showing Luna along with the stars and their positions in the sky dome. The second is the same photo with the star constellations of Orion The Hunter, Canis Minor "The Lesser Dog", and Taurus The Bull in relation to the bright Gemini Twins -- the stars for their constellation are unfortunately not visible due to the brightness of the Waxing Gibbous Moon phase.
The Winter Triangle stars of Procyon and Betelgeuse are all clearly visible and mark the positions of Orion and Canis Minor. Sirius, the brightest star of the Constellation Canis Major "The Greater Dog" is at the very bottom making up the final point of the Winter Triangle. Unfortunately I could not get the entire constellation itself into frame.
Luna sits right beside the giant star Pollux, the brightest star of the Constellation Gemini and the 18th brightest star in our night sky. Pollux sits about 34 light-years (or 10.4 parsecs) distance from our Sun and its the closest giant star relative to our Solar System. Pollux is almost nine times the diameter of our sun and about 30 times the sun’s brightness in visible light.
Its "twin" Castor, the second-brightest star in Gemini, is a bit more tricky since its not one, but six stars that appear as one to the naked eye. The Castor system is organized into three binary pairs made up of two bright white A-Type stars with four smaller M-Type red dwarf stars that orbit each other. Castor sits about 51 light-years (or 15.6 parsecs) from the Sun.
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| Castor Aa, the main star of the system, is more than twice the size of our own Sun. Image via NASA/ JPL-Caltech/ Wikimedia Commons (public domain). |
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