AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |
Back to Blog
Stars in cassiopeia constellation3/31/2023 It has a mass 15 times greater than our sun, shines 40,000 times brighter, and forms the central most star in the traditional ‘W’ shape of the constellation. – Gamma Cassiopeia, the constellation’s brightest star, is a blue (B0.5 IVe) variable star located nearly 600 light years away whose visual magnitude ranges between 1.6 and 3.0. We usually associate Cassiopeia with its five most luminous stars which make up the majority of the constellation, although there are actually 53 Bayer/Flamsteed designated stars: Perseus on his winged-horse Pegasus subsequently rescued Andromeda from Cetus, whom her father ( Cepheus) and mother (Cassiopeia) had tied to a rock to appease the monster, and so Poseidon decided to punish Cassiopeia all the same by tying her to a chair and placing her in the heavens where she still circles the northern sky, spending half her time upside-down. Naturally, the fabled sea god Poseidon himself took offense and sent a sea monster (Cetus) to ravage their kingdom. She even boasted that her beauty, and that of her daughter Andromeda, was greater than that of the Nereids (sea nymphs). It is surrounded in the night sky by a family of constellations associated with the legend of Perseus, including the hero’s winged horse Pegasus, the queen’s husband Cepheus, her daughter Andromeda, and the sea monster Cetus.Ĭassiopeia, the mother of Andromeda, was a woman who prized vanity above respect for the Gods, which in ancient Greece was not the wisest of decisions for our self-absorbed heroine. True scientific astronomy has its roots in the attempts of ancient astrologers to predict future occurrences of, for instance, imperial Jupiter and the blood-red planet Mars meeting within the charging bull of Taurus - a potentially powerful omen for those who believed the planets represented the gods themselves.Cassiopeia is named after a vain Ethiopian queen from Greek mythology. It was reasoned that these zodiacal constellations must be special to make up this path, and the relative positions of the "wandering stars" within them bore great importance. Since ancient times, the Sun, Moon, and planets have been known as special astronomical objects - they "wander" through the background stars of the zodiac, which remain fixed with respect to each other. The significance of the zodiac stems from the fact that the ecliptic - the narrow path on the sky that the Sun, Moon, and planets appear to follow - runs directly through these star groupings. Though many people start their days by checking their horoscope in the newspaper, the 12 constellations of the zodiac are no more important to astronomers than the other 76 constellations. How do the signs of the zodiac relate to astronomy? To clear up the confusion, names and boundaries were "officially" assigned to 88 constellations by the International Astronomical Union in 1930, providing complete coverage of the entire sky. In fact, by the 19th century the night sky had become crowded with overlapping and often contradictory constellation boundaries and names as different schools of astronomy prepared their own versions of star maps. Of course, many of the constellation names are more modern - Telescopium, the telescope, being a rather obvious newcomer. Orion, the hunter, bears a Greek name, but had been seen as a hunter-hero figure since the times of ancient Babylon. refer to the star group as "Ip," the scorpion king. Scorpius, for instance, was given its name from the Latin word for scorpion, but ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs from before 3000 B.C. Most constellation names are Latin in origin, dating from the Roman empire, but their meanings often originated in the distant past of human civilization. How did the constellations get their names?
0 Comments
Read More
Leave a Reply. |