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Constellation Report
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Constellation
Report |
 This weekend we move on to the constellation
Corvus
the Crow.
Corvus was the bird of Apollo. He was instructed
to fetch a beaker of water for Apollo. Unfortunately, Corvus got
sidetracked. When he finally returned with the water, Apollo changed his
feathers from a beautiful white color to a dark and dirty black. In
addition, Apollo took Corvus' beautiful voice and replaced it with a screeching
sound. Finally, Apollo put Corvus and the beaker of water (Crater) and
placed them in the sky.
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Deep
Sky Report
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The focus of our efforts here will be the deep sky objects of
Corvus
Let's start things off by peaking at Delta Corvi. This
is an easy double star for small telescopes. The components are mag 3 and mag 8.
Delta Corvi, otherwise known as Algorab is the brightest of the stars at the
northwest corner of the constellation.
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 Ok, let's start things off with a very interesting
Interacting Galaxy Pair.. NGC4038 & NGC4039(mag10.7). Also known as the Antennae Galaxy, this pair is locked in a gravitational tug-o-war. They'll probably end up merged into one larger galaxy in a few hundred million years. Stay tuned :)
Anyway... locating this object shouldn't be all that difficult as you can use the top two stars in Corvus to point the way. I was looking at this last weekend. They handle magnification well. At low power, they were hard to separate. This was simplified by cranking the power up to about 200x.
How's this for a cool shot? Taken by astro-imager Al
Kelly, the pair look like a heart rolled on it's side.
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 Next we'll hit
Planetary Nebula NGC4361, (mag10). Checkout this shot by Gordon
Waite.
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 Let's wrap things up with this weeks
Utah Skies Challenge Object, Spiral Galaxy NGC4462 (mag12)
Good Luck!
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Events |
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Did you ever consider... |
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"Science is facts; just as houses are made of stones, so is science made of facts; but a pile of stones is not a house and a collection of facts is not necessarily science." - Henri Poincare |
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