salutations celestial sight seers I'm David fuller welcome to eyes on the sky
what's up this week okay so everyone has gotten past the holiday season they've
gotten their new equipment hopefully and they probably gone out and looked at a
specific area of the sky that happens to have three bright stars in a row all
about the same size all about same distance part I'm obviously speaking of
Orion but probably not the area that you're thinking of in Orion when we
think of this particular constellation we think of the four bright stars around
the outside edge Betelgeuse Bellatrix Rigel and safe and then the
belt stars that bisect it Alnitak Alnilam and Mintaka in the middle
however those are really the shoulders the belt and the knees of that
particular constellation and very often we're focused right here where his sword
is supposed to be however there are other things to see
for example Orion is a hunter he was a human therefore he would have a head and
his head is actually provided by the open cluster Calendar 69 and that
particular constellation are that particular open cluster was named the
number was the 69th cluster that the Swedish astronomer calendar actually had
catalogued it so to find it it's not very difficult you're just looking
between Betelgeuse and Bellatrix and up slightly so it's a little closer to
Bellatrix and a little easier to kind of go across if you want to use a telescope
but even binoculars will pick up a number of stars in this particular
cluster so if we Center that and zoom in some we can start to see that we've got
some fairly bright stars here this particular star Mesa which is lamda
Orionis is actually a double star and these are some really really hot and
bright stars they are very far away the distance
is thousand light years and this star is about thirty five thousand degrees so
it's incredibly luminous it's incredibly hot it just happens to not be close
enough to us to be ridiculously brighter about a million or so years ago this
star was about the brightness of Venus in our sky but it's receding from us in
further away so it's not as bright anymore if you look you'll see that
there's three neat little stars right here lined up in a row all about the
same brightness and right in between Mesa and phi-1 Orionis and phi2 Orionis
is over here Phi 1 and Phi 2 are actually not physically related you can
see the distance is 1080 seven light years for one and a 117 light-years away
for fight 2 so quite a bit different one is much much closer and if we zoom in
just a little bit and kind of get an idea of what we might be looking at with
a telescope this is kind of more like the binoculars view kind of like this
actually this go ahead and show binoculars for you let me bring that up
using the Stellarium z-- options so there's a seven degrees binoculars view
of calendar 69 and you can see how there's these fairly bright stars HIV 26
to 15 is also a double star that one is a little bit tighter together and might
be a little bit more difficult to split then Mesa is and then you can see the
rest of these stars I actually didn't have much trouble seeing even these
stars and now these are some of these are like 8th and 9th magnitude now I
have a little bit better skies because I'm not quite as light polluted as a lot
of other areas so these might be more difficult to see for some other people
but at very least you should be able to see this six magnitude star Mesa is a
3.5 these are all 7th magnitude stars these 3 in the middle and then Phi 1 and
Phi 2 our fourth magnitude star so not difficult to be able to track down now
let me zoom in a little bit more using a telescope we can see a little bit more
too now the way I have these particular
oculars and telescopes set up on Stellarium this is showing that I have a
field of view at one point seven degrees and a magnification about 37 that's
about kind of how I felt it looked when I was using a 14 millimeter 82 a parent
field of view explore scientific eyepiece in my 6 inch f5 reflector and a
kind of had this appearance so that would be about I think approximately
what I was seeing and I wasn't seeing the stars I'm just showing quite a thing
here I was I think if I would let myself dark adapt a little bit more I probably
was seeing some of these he's 11th and 12th magnitude stars but I did not get
quite that detailed but I was able to see these stars without any problem
whatsoever because these are just eight magnitude stars so while that might be
difficult for some people with a telescope with binoculars with a
telescope 8th and 9th magnitude not a problem at all and this was an
absolutely lovely sight it's sparse so don't get the feeling that you're gonna
see a lot of stars like you would and say globular cluster or whatever but you
will see quite a number of stars here easily a dozen to two dozen stars and if
you are patient enough and have some darker skies and a little bit more
aperture perhaps even more than that some people see up to 40 and 50 stars in
this particular region of the sky but if we zoom in even closer on Mesa and I'm
gonna take off the oculars because I want to zoom in
kind of manually on this because what I'm going to wind up having to do is go
into the sky and viewing options window and change the absolute scale and the
relative scale and then you can actually see how those stars are split you won't
see that nebulosity this is a really bright thing it's an artifact I think of
stellarium but these stars are very close together I kind of felt like I saw
them about like that when I had my magnification
about 125 times so definitely doable with a little bit of extra magnification
on there not too difficult to split kind of had to have some fairly said these
study skies which I did but this was definitely a nice view to be able to see
and split that particular really really hot set of stars Oh class of B Class
stars that are sitting over a thousand light-years away from Earth so you've
really got this kind of neat like super zoomed in view that you can do like that
don't actually forget about that particular star because that's also a
double star - I did not look at that one I'm not going to go into that one but
you could try and look for that one - Mesa is about 4 and 1/2 - arc second
split this one is narrower it's about 3 arc seconds so that's a little bit
tighter to do but then as you zoom out some more you can get a nice view of
that whole cluster and they've been from a binocular standpoint you can see a
lovely set of stars right there that form of Orion's head in Orion the Hunter
so that's all for this week keep your eyes on the sky and your outdoor lights
aimed down so we can all see what's up and if you would please share these
videos I know a lot of times on YouTube they now have a lot of videos off to the
side which are designed to just get people to look with either the name or
whatever on here but I know I've had a wonderful feedback from people that my
videos are helpful for them in finding things in the night sky so if you would
consider sharing this with other people I would certainly appreciate that
you