Carina – The Amazing Sky

April 3, 2017April 3, 2017

Hello, Austral Autumn Sky

Southern Autumn Sky Panorama (Spherical)

The sky looks very different from down under. This is the entire sky of early evening as autumn begins in the southern hemisphere.

My last post showed Orion and the winter sky disappearing into the west, from home in Alberta.

This post shows that same area of sky (here at top) also setting into the west. But that’s the only area of sky familiar to northern hemisphere stargazers.

Everything below Orion and Sirius is new celestial territory for the northern astronomer. Welcome to the fabulous southern hemisphere sky.

And to the autumn sky – From home it is spring. From here in the southern hemisphere summer is giving way to cool nights of autumn.

Straight up, at centre, is the faint Milky Way area containing the constellations of Puppis and Vela, formerly in the constellation of Argo Navis.

Below, the Milky Way brightens in Carina and Crux, the Southern Cross, where dark lanes divide the Milky Way.

At right, the two patches of light are the Large and Small Magellanic Clouds, satellite galaxies of our Milky Way.

The bright object at left is Jupiter rising over the Tasman Sea.

I shot this 360° panorama on March 31, 2017 from Cape Conran on the Gippsland Coast of Victoria, Australia, at a latitude of 37° South.

I’ve turned the panorama so Orion appears as we’re used to seeing him, head up and feet below. But here in the southern hemisphere the image below despicts what he looks like, as he dives headfirst into the west in the evening twilight.

The bright object here is the waxing crescent Moon, here in Taurus. Taurus is below Orion, while Sirius (the bright star at top) and the stars of Canis Major are above Orion.

This view above takes in more of Canis Major. Note the Pleiades to the right of the Moon.

Visiting the southern hemisphere is a wonderful experience for any stargazer. The sky is disorienting, but filled with new wonders to see and old sights turned quite literally on their heads!

April 27, 2014April 27, 2014

The Night Sky’s Two Brightest Stars

The two brightest stars in the night sky shine in the southern sky.

Here are Sirius (at right) and Canopus (at bottom left), the brightest and second brightest stars in the night sky, together near the southern Milky Way.

My image also captures the huge loops of the Gum Nebula, thought to be the remains of a supernova that blew up a million years ago. It’s utterly invisible to the naked eye, but Sirius and Canopus stand out as brilliant stars even from light polluted sites.

Sirius can be seen from northern latitudes but Canopus is below the horizon for any location north of 37° North or so. I shot this image from Australia where these stars pass overhead.

Sirius is a hot blue-white star 8.6 light years away. Canopus appears slightly dimmer but only because it lies much farther away, at some 310 light years. In reality it is a supergiant yellow-white star that shines with a luminosity 15,000 times that of our Sun.

This image takes in Canopus at bottom right, next to the Large Magellanic Cloud, and with the southern Milky Way sweeping across the top, with the Carina Nebula and its attendant star clusters at top left and parts of the Gum Nebula at right.

Here are a few cocktail party facts about Canopus:

• In 480,000 years its motion around the Galaxy will bring Canopus close enough to Earth that it will become the brightest star in our night sky, outranking Sirius.

• The origin of its name is a mystery. One idea is that the star is named for the pilot of the ship that took Menelaus to Troy on the quest to re-capture Helen.

• Canopus, the star, was used in ancient times as a key navigation star for those sailing to southern seas, as it would have risen above the southern horizon from latitudes below 35° North back around 2000 BCE.

• Today, Canopus is charted as the brightest star in the constellation of Carina the Keel, part of the ancient constellation of Argo Navis, named for the ship sailed by Jason and the Argonauts.

December 16, 2012December 16, 2012

Ultrawide Southern Sky

This horizon-to-horizon image takes in a broad sweep of the southern Milky Way from Orion to the Southern Cross.

At upper left shines bright Jupiter in Taurus and the stars of Orion, upside down. To the right of Orion is Sirius in Canis Major, the brightest star in the night sky. To the right of Sirius above the Milky Way is Canopus, the second brightest star in the night sky and one we don’t see from up north. The two satellite galaxy Magellanic Clouds are at upper right. Below them is the bright Milky Way through Carina and Crux, the Southern Cross. Alpha and Beta Centauri are just above the dark trees at right. This is the entire Milky Way you see on an early austral summer night from down under.

What stands out is the huge red bubble of gas called the Gum Nebula in Vela and Carina. It is strictly a photographic object but shows up well on red-sensitive digital cameras.

I shot this with a filter-modified Canon 5D Mark II camera and a 15mm wide-angle lens on a mount tracking the stars. It is a stack of four 6-minute exposures, shot from Australia a few nights ago under nearly perfect sky conditions.

June 4, 2011

The Seven Sisters of the South

Down in the south sit many austral equivalents to namesake northern sky objects: the Southern Cross, the Southern Beehive, the Southern Pinwheel. This is the “Southern Pleiades,” a match to the famous Pleiades star cluster prominent in our northern hemisphere sky. Since our Pleiades also carries the moniker the “Seven Sisters,” I suppose that makes this object the “Seven Sisters of the South.”

The field here again duplicates what binoculars would show, and this is a lovely object for binos. Its resemblance to the northern Pleiades comes from this star cluster’s bright but scattered appearance, and the blue colour of its sorority of stars. Like its northern counterpart, the Southern Pleiades is a cluster of hot young stars which shine furiously blue in their energetic youth. This group is perhaps no more than 50 million years old, and like the northern Sisters, shines quite close by, just 480 light years away, putting it a stone’s throw away down our own galactic spiral arm.

Officially catalogued as IC 2602, and also dubbed the Theta Carinae Cluster, this clutch of blue stars shines just below the Carina Nebula (you can see both together in my earlier blog The Best Nebula in the Sky). A couple of other fainter star clusters also populate the field.

I took this shot with the Canon 7D and 135mm telephoto lens and stacked five 2-minute exposures. Stacking helps smooth out background noise, though in a wide field shot like this, the sheer number of stars tends to overwhelm any camera noise.