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Hello, and welcome to our night sky lab on the winter sky.
I've loaded Stellarium. And as you see, we're here in the daytime. That's not exactly what we want.
And so I'm going to now switch to nighttime, stop the motion. We cover how to do this in other videos.
So let's do this.
Pause.
We will change the date to the 1st of February at 9:30 in the evening.
And I'm going to make sure that we have our atmosphere. Start with a light pollution of 2.
And we're going to turn off the planets so that they won't be messing us up.
So in this video, I will be covering just the names of the constellations, some stars within them,
some objects inside of the constellation that I want you to know.
And in your lab packet, you will need to go and look up some additional information online,
such as some mythology, some data about individual objects.
The stars and objects that we point out now are objects that I want you to know and be able to find,
both here in Stellarium and hopefully also in the night sky.
Every season has a signpost constellation, and this signpost constellation helps us find all the other constellations that I want you to know.
And in the winter, the signpost constellation that we want is the constellation Orion.
If you remember, there are many ways that we can view constellations on here.
We can have just the dots, like this, which we will get to.
We can also show the artwork, which you can either bring up in your menu down here,
or you see we can use the hotkey "R" to bring that up.
We can also connect the dots with a "C."
And, finally, we can bring up names of the constellations with a "V."
So let's begin by bringing up some artwork of Orion.
Orion is a hunter. And so, in our artwork, you see he's got a lion's skin in front of him as a shield.
He has stars that mark his shoulders and his feet or knees.
He's wearing a belt. He has a dagger hanging from his belt and a club behind him in the sky.
And unlike most constellations, when we connect the dots, we can see that Orion sort of looks like what the artwork is supposed to be.
Let me also label the names here.
So you see Orion. He has his head. He's got two shoulders, a belt, a dagger, two knees.
Or if you want, the one bright star is his foot, but I just see it as two knees.
He's holding a shield out in front of him and a club raised over his head, ready to attack.
In Orion, there are two stars that I want you to know the names of.
And they are already labeled on here: Betelgeuse and Rigel.
Betelgeuse is a red supergiant star.
We call it that because, first of all, it's reddish in color.
And if you go out in the night sky and compare it to the stars around it, it does look reddish.
And second, because, if it were in our solar system, Betelgeuse is so large that all the planets out to and including Jupiter --
So it is truly a super huge star, so we call it a red supergiant.
Orion's opposite knee or the star that was his foot in the artwork is called Rigel.
Rigel is a blue giant star, meaning it's blue in color.
To our eyes, to most people's eyes, it looks a brilliant white, maybe with a tinge of blue.
Rigel is also a giant star, because it's many times the mass of the sun.
And it's nearing the end of its life.
As we learned, a red giant star like Betelgeuse is reaching the end of its life.
Rigel is getting close to that point, so it is turning into a red giant like Betelgeuse.
The last thing I would like you to know in Orion is the middle star of his dagger.
If we were to zoom in on it, we would see that it is really not a star at all, but what we call a nebula.
The name of this nebula is the Orion Nebula, or Messier 42.
Messier was a comet hunter, and he saw lots of fuzzy things in the sky with his telescope that were not comets,
so he kept a list of those, of where they were located, so he wouldn't make a mistake.
And that middle star of Orion's dagger is actually the 42nd object that ended up in Messier's catalogue, the Orion Nebula.
So this is the constellation Orion.
I call it our signpost constellation because we can use it to find two of the other constellations that I want you to know in the winter sky.
If you follow Orion's belt down and to the left, or toward the southeast, you will come to the constellation Canis Major.
So let me focus in on that constellation.
So you see Orion's belt points nearly toward that star, bright star Sirius.
Sirius is the heart of the dog. It's the brightest star in the night sky.
And it's the brightest star in the constellation Canis Major.
Here you see, by connecting the dots, that the stars in the constellation look sort of like a dog.
Most of the stars that make up the figure of the dog are a lot fainter than the stars around it.
And so if there's a little light pollution or a little haze in the sky, you may not see most of the stars.
However, I'll now outline the stars that are relatively bright and I can almost always see.
And even with this -- it's a stick figure -- you see that it does look sort of like a dog.
He follows Orion through the sky. He's Orion's hunting dog.
This is Canis Major. "Canis" is Latin for "dog." "Major" means "large."
The only star in this constellation you need to know is the bright star Sirius.
And in your packet, you'll find some interesting facts about the star Sirius.
So let's go back to Orion.
And here at Orion, if we follow his belt now up and to the right, or toward the northwest,
we will come to another constellation, called Taurus, the bull.
If we connect the dots, we can begin to see the outlines of what we might call the bull.
Let me bring up the artwork as well.
You see that he has two horns, two stars that mark the tip of the horns.
He's got a "V" of stars that mark his face.
There is a little tight grouping of stars called the Pleiades that mark sort of the bull's heart.
And then coming down, we have something that marks his front leg.
Now, if we remove the artwork, it's a lot harder to see the bull.
But his face and his horns, the "V" that makes his face and the horns, come out, stand out rather well.
There are three objects I want you to know in the constellation Taurus, the bull.
And first is the star Aldebaran.
"Aldebaran" means "the follower," because it follows that little group of stars that we call the Pleiades through the sky.
It is a red giant star. Not nearly as large as Betelgeuse, but it's relatively close to us.
And Aldebaran is part of the "V" of stars that marks the face of the bull.
That "V" is a cluster of stars called the Hyades.
And in your packet, you'll learn more about what a star cluster is, what the Hyades and the Pleiades are,
and some more information about them.
And again, you see we can find the Hyades, we can find the face of the bull by following the belt of Orion over toward the northwest.
Two final constellations.
First, if you follow the shoulders of Orion off toward the left, toward the east,
we end up near this bright star called Procyon.
"Procyon" means "before the dog."
And from most parts of the northern hemisphere, it rises about an hour or so before the star Sirius.
So when the ancients would see that star rise, they would know the Dog Star was going to rise shortly thereafter.
The star Procyon is part of the constellation Canis Minor.
Remember, "Canis" means "dog."
"Minor" means "small."
So this is the little dog. It's the second of Orion's two hunting dogs.
And from a connect-the-dots point of view, it's a very simple constellation. Just two stars.
We can add the artwork, and you can see that people, yes, did imagine it as a little dog.
But there are just two stars in this constellation.
Procyon being fairly bright, and that other star is also moderately bright.
So you can often see both these stars, see the entire constellation on any clear night in the winter.
Our final constellation can be found above Orion, up to the north, northeast of Orion.
Let me just poke up a little bit here.
And if we follow a line going from Rigel through Betelgeuse and keep going, we come close to this star, Pollux.
Pollux is one of the twins of Gemini, "the twins."
So let me put up the artwork for the twins first.
Gemini. You can see Pollux is the one on the left, close to Procyon.
So the two P's are close to each other.
The other twin is named Castor.
Castor and Pollux are twins in Mythology.
They're not quite the same brightness in the sky, so they're fraternal twins. They're not identical twins.
And you can see that, connecting the dots, it looks like two stick figures:
Pollux being bow-legged; Castor having sort of short legs.
They're hand in hand, going through the sky together.
So these are the objects that I want you to know in the winter sky:
Our signpost constellation, Orion.
We follow his belt down and to the left to find the star Sirius,
which is in the constellation Canis Major, the big dog.
We follow his belt up and to the right to get to the face of Taurus, the bull.
We can follow his shoulders off to the east, off to the left, to find the star Procyon, which is one of two stars in Canis Minor.
And we can follow a line from Rigel through Betelgeuse, up to find Pollux in the constellation Gemini, the twins.
The stars that I want you to know are Castor and Pollux in Gemini, Procyon in Canis Minor, Sirius in Canis Major,
Betelgeuse and Rigel in Orion, and Aldebaran in Taurus.
Finally, there are three what we would call deep sky objects, things that are not just single stars, that I want you to know in the winter sky:
Messier 42 in Orion;
and the star clusters the Hyades, that make up the "V" of the face of Taurus,
and the Pleiades, that little tight grouping that appears to make up the heart of Taurus, the bull.
So my hope is that you will practice learning these constellations, these stars, and these deep sky objects,
as in the last week of lab, we will have a test over them.
If you need practice, remember that you can bring up the artwork with our menu or by pressing "R."
Pressing it again moves it away.
You can connect the dots with the letter "C."
And you can bring up constellation labels by pressing "V."
This ends your brief orientation to the winter sky.