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Astronomical naming conventions. In ancient times, only the Sun and Moon, a few stars, and the most easily visible planets had names. Over the last few hundred years, the number of identified astronomical objects has risen from hundreds to over a billion, and more are discovered every year. Astronomers need to be able to assign systematic ...
All stars but one can be associated with an IAU (International Astronomical Union) constellation. IAU constellations are areas of the sky. Although there are only 88 IAU constellations, the sky is actually divided into 89 irregularly shaped boxes as the constellation Serpens is split into two separate sections, Serpens Caput (the snake's head) to the west and Serpens Cauda (the snake's tail ...
Atlas (star) Atlas / ˈætləs /, [13] designation 27 Tauri, is a triple star system in the constellation of Taurus. It is a member of the Pleiades, an open star cluster ( M45 ). It is 431 light-years (132 parsecs) away, [8] and is 3.92 degrees north of the ecliptic .
The Twenty-Eight Mansions ( Chinese: 二十八宿; pinyin: Èrshíbā Xiù ), also called xiu [1] or hsiu, are part of the Chinese constellations system. They can be considered as the equivalent to the zodiacal constellations in Western astronomy, though the Twenty-eight Mansions reflect the movement of the Moon through a sidereal month rather ...
In practice, names are only universally used for the very brightest stars ( Sirius, Arcturus, Vega, etc.) and for a small number of slightly less bright but "interesting" stars ( Algol, Polaris, Mira, etc.). For other naked eye stars, the Bayer or Flamsteed designation is often preferred. In addition to the traditional names, a small number of ...
It contains Ursa Major and the Hyades star cluster, among others. The Local Bubble also contains the neighboring G-Cloud, which contains the stars Alpha Centauri and Altair. In the galactic context, the Local Bubble is a small part of the Orion Arm, which contains most stars that we can see without a telescope.
The close-up images show a dense cloud of dust and gas, which is a stellar nursery full of embryonic stars. This cloud is about 8 ly away from the nebula's central star. A stellar jet protrudes from the head of the cloud and is about 0.75 ly long. The jet's source is a young stellar object deep within the cloud.
Chinese constellations. Traditional Chinese astronomy has a system of dividing the celestial sphere into asterisms or constellations, known as "officials" ( Chinese 星 官 xīng guān ). [1] The Chinese asterisms are generally smaller than the constellations of Hellenistic tradition. The Song dynasty (13th-century) Suzhou planisphere shows a ...