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I found this image on the internet and it amazed me, saving it to my hard drive happened without even thinking considering that skyimagelab.com is selling them for $10.85 American for an 8X10 print, I prefer the old right click and Save Image As option.
NASA photographed this from the Hubble Space Telescope and is also called the Helix Nebula. It's boring technical designation is NGC 7293 but that doesn't matter, it doesn't sound half as cool as the other ones. It's about 650 light years away in the direction of the constellation Aquarius and it's about 2.5 light years wide. The remaining center of the stellar cored, which is destined to become a white dwarf star, glows with light so energetic that it causes the gases already expelled to glow and illuminate. Planetary nebulae are created at the end of a Sun-like star's life span and this is the closest example that we have of one.
In February of 2007 two comets collided in the middle of the nebula near the dead star and it was a great surprise to those observing the entity, so of course they went multi-million dollar camera happy. The large amounts of dust around the nebula are said to be from comets that survived the death of their star and are still smashing into each other. Thanks to this, the radiation from the stellar corpse keep lighting up the dust; giving it such wonderful colours. Scientists say that it won't last long, in 10,000 years the clouds will fade; I'm almost afraid that my grandchildren won't see it.
It is said that is approximately 5 million years our own sun will have grown into a white dwarf, only the outer large planets left, and will also pass away in the same spectacular manner. I'd say that's a load of male cow dung but I'm not getting paid thousands of dollars to take pictures with expensive cameras and stare through telescopes for hours on end while I sit in a lazyboy-resembling chair. Don't get me wrong, I have nothing against astronomers; I would enjoy being one myself, but I don't believe many of their theories so I'd never get hired.
'The Northern Crown'. It's name makes perfect sense considering that everyone knows the Northern Lights are called Aurora Borealis then Borealis definitely means North and Aurora being light. All things considered, 'crown' must be corona. It struck me when I made this realization that Corona, the popular light beer brewed in Mexico, holds the name of crown.
There is also a Southern Crown constellation but I chose the northern because it's in my own hemisphere, therefore I'll actually be able to look into the sky and see it. This way I get to familiarize myself with it's shape and location by simply writing this article and finding it in our night sky shouldn't be difficult, especially with the help of the SkyGazer software from this astronomy class.
To the facts now, then, Corona Borealis is a constellation made up of 6 stars that form a semicircular arc and are located near Hercules and Boötes, it's brightest star being Alphecca. It's not an overly exciting constellation, there aren't any deep sky bright objects in it, and no first magnitude stars but it's still my second favourite just because it's a crown. In depth reasoning for the favourtism, I know. Mythologically, this constellation was considered to represent the crown that was given by Dionysus (the Greek god of wine and a son of Zeus) to Ariadne, the daughter of Minos of Crete. It's also said to belong to Boötes, which would make sense since it's right next to him in the sky.
All things considered, I admire it for how closely it looks like the object it was named after, the stars representing not only its shape but the jewels on the royal crown. I've always had a fascination with monarchical jewels and finding one in the sky was pleasing to me.
Cygnus is at Mount Allison.
Actually... there are two.
Yes, we have two lovely (but savage) swans.
I swear they weren't the reason why I chose to come to this school...
...At least not the only one.
I was delighted to learn that one of the 88 magnificent constellations in our sky was a swan. Swans have always been an image of peace and beauty to me, making them one of my most favorite animals.
It's a northern constellation, and with much wine back in the olden days, the layout of the 6 stars that highly resemble a cross must have looked like a swan to them. Must have been good wine.
Deneb, a blue supergiant, forms the swan's tail, also a vertex of the Summer Triangle. Albireo is at the swan's beak and is in fact a double star, an exceptionally beautiful one at that.
Concerning some of the mythology of this glorious swan, in the tales it says that Zeus disguised himself as a swan to seduce Leda (one of his many *cough* *cough* vulgar promiscuity). She gave him three children, Helen of Troy, Clytemnestra, and the Gemini, very famously known as the zodiac twins.
You could also say that the swan is Orpheus, for he was turned into a swan after his murder and was then supposedly placed into the sky.
For myself, I like to think of the swan as an animal which resembles a piece of heaven on Earth; Cygnus glides through our sky as gracefully as God made the species swim across our waters.
