Constellations from the World

video
Created for the OAE

Caption: Third place in the 2022 IAU OAE Astrophotography Contest, category Time lapses of celestial patterns.   This video tries to cover a huge variety of phenomena in the night sky from different locations — Iceland and China — and is designed like a theatre play, starring mother nature herself. It starts with a blue twilight sky that dims and unveils the starry night sky on the stage with terrestrial clouds on a beautiful landscape. The impressive parts of the southern Milky Way between Scorpius and Crux, with the pointer stars Alpha and Beta Centaurus, are shown passing by majestically. The terrestrial clouds blur the stars and allow us to recognise their colours even more clearly. The first act presents the starry sky in human culture. One scene shows the Pleiades rising over the top of a hill, while a human moves hastily with a flashlight below. At the very moment that the Pleiades rises behind the hill, the beam of the flashlight hits the camera. There is some humour in this remarkable scene referencing the human relationship to the rise of the Pleiades in cultural history. The next scene shows The Big Dipper, Ursa Major, as a typical northern constellation, with an arch of aurora below it. The aurora evolves and moves but does not change much fundamentally. In northern human cultures, aurorae were often interpreted as the ghosts of ancestors, but this play does not spend any time on human beliefs, instead moving the view southwards in the subsequent scenes. First we see some stars rising shortly before sunrise. The lightcone of Zodiacal light appears in Gemini/Taurus and the horizon gets brighter. In the next scene, at about 1 minute and 13 seconds, we see Orion setting over water, so that the water surface mirrors the celestial scene. Some clouds crossing the image prove that the videos were really taken on our beautiful planet, and, since Orion’s shoulder and foot are seen to set almost simultaneously, this sequence must have been captured almost at the equator. In this area, the bright stars of Orion look like a huge butterfly, with Orion’s Belt forming the body, and the quadrilateral of four bright stars interpreted as the wings. As in a real theatre, we now see a curtain before the next act of the heavenly play, an aurora curtain. The next act presents several bright stars in original scenes: the Chinese asterisms of The Tail (of the Azure Dragon), the Winnowing Basket and the Southern Dipper, which are seen in the modern constellations Scorpius and Sagittarius. The striking shape of Corona Borealis that has been recognised as an asterism in many cultures all over the globe, is also shown, as are some planets, the stars Vega and Deneb with adjacent areas, Altair, the Milky Way, and the characteristic W shape of Cassiopeia that has also been an asterism for many cultures on Earth. The outro presents two more scenes with a smooth and silent night sky.
Credit: Stephanie Ye Ziyi/IAU OAE

Glosar de termeni: Big Dipper , Constellation , Milky Way , Orion
Categories: Milky Way and Interstellar Medium , Naked Eye Astronomy

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Between Two Skies

image
Created for the OAE

Caption: Honourable mention in the 2022 IAU OAE Astrophotography Contest, category Still images of celestial patterns.   Taken from Narrabri, Australia, in April 2014, this photograph shows a meteor next to the Large Magellanic Cloud and the reflection of all this in the water. The Magellanic Clouds are named after the Portuguese explorer Ferdinand Magellan, who made the first maps of the southern part of South America in the early 16th century but did not survive his expedition voyage. His shipmates called the two nebulae after him, and it was only in the 20th century that astronomy research discovered that they are in fact dwarf galaxies accompanying our own. In the 18th century, the French mathematician J-N. Lacaille, who lived in South Africa for some years in order to draw maps of the sky and the land, invented some new constellations. He measured the positions of some faint stars and listed them in his star catalogue, but did not try to overlay beautiful drawings of real-world objects on the star patterns, so he could name them however he wanted. He was based in the trade station that is now the city of Cape Town and, from this bay, Table Mountain is visible. Lacaille learned from the navigators that they used the clouds around this mountain to predict whether or not the wind would blow in the correct direction and allow for sailing. Normally, there is a huge white cloud at the top of Table Mountain, so Lacaille considered the larger one of the two dwarf galaxies not a “Magellanic Cloud”, but the cloud at Table Mountain. Consequently, he invented the constellation “Mensa”, Table Mountain, in the small area of faint stars directly attached to this dwarf galaxy.
Credit: Fabrizio Melandri/IAU OAE

Glosar de termeni: Constellation , Shooting Star , Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC) , Small Magellanic Cloud (SMC)
Categories: Galaxies , Naked Eye Astronomy

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Winter Constellations

video
Created for the OAE

Caption: Second place in the 2022 IAU OAE Astrophotography Contest, category Time lapses of celestial patterns.   Sirius, the brightest star in the night sky, is shown rising, setting and passing by. Sometimes constellations and asterisms are also visible, including Orion, Taurus and the Pleiades. In the first scene, the aforementioned constellations are covered by a semi-transparent golden veil. The next scenes show it rising in a dark blue night sky. In one of the scenes, a planet brightly decorates the faint constellation Pisces. The videos were taken above various landscapes and places of cultural heritage on Earth. Some of them simply show monuments in the desert, while others show palm trees with waving leaves.
Credit: Amirreza Kamkar/IAU OAE

Glosar de termeni: Constellation , Sirius , Taurus , Orion , Pleiades

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Southern Sky

video
Created for the OAE

Caption: First place in the 2022 IAU OAE Astrophotography Contest, category Time lapses of celestial patterns.   This video is a compilation of several recordings taken on various occasions in June 2019, both on Easter Island and in the Atacama Desert in Chile. It starts with an impressive opening of clouds seeming to emerge behind the famous statues on Easter Island and moving directly forwards towards the observer. It evokes the impression of the mighty deities sending clouds to cover the night sky. In the next couple of scenes, we see landscapes with an impressive Milky Way turning overhead, but this quiet scene is continuously interrupted by hasty satellites or — in one of the scenes — even by car lights on the ground. It illustrates both the majesty of the sky and the disturbance of nature by human influence. Then there is another scene of clouds passing by, but now from left to right. The terrestrial clouds pass below the clouds of stars that form the Milky Way. The last scene shows an undisturbed still pattern of stars that looks like a flight over a zoomed-in photograph, and shows how we are not used to experiencing nature’s stillness and silence.
Credit: Jianfeng Dai/IAU OAE

Glosar de termeni: Milky Way
Categories: Milky Way and Interstellar Medium , Naked Eye Astronomy

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Forgoing the Summer Triangle as it sets in the early winter evening

image
Created for the OAE

Caption: Winner in the 2022 IAU OAE Astrophotography Contest, category Still images of celestial patterns.   This image was taken from Nagano, Japan, in December 2018, and shows three prominent constellations: Aquila (towards the lower-left of the image), Cygnus (in the upper part of the image) and Lyra (bottom-right). The brightest stars within these constellations (Altair, Deneb and Vega) form the three vertices of the asterism known as the Summer Triangle. The star Altair is the brightest star towards the bottom-left of the image, Deneb is the brightest star towards the top-right of the image, and Vega is the brightest star towards the bottom-right of the image. In Asian cultures the stars Vega and Altair represent a love story between the weaver girl and the herdsman, who are separated by the faint band of the Milky Way, but in July are allowed to cross the heavenly river (the Milky Way) to be together. The Boorong people of Northeast Victoria, Australia, associate the reappearance of Vega — after its yearly disappearance from view — with the time when the Mallee fowls build nests. The Boorong also associate their indigenous constellation Neilloan with the goddess Mallee-hen (Vega), mother of Totyarguil (Altair), the hero who created the Murray River. In Wardaman traditions, the star Vega acts as a gateway to the Milky Way for spirits of the deceased. The star name Altair is abbreviated from the Arabic “Al-Nasr Al-Ta’ir” (meaning “The Flying Eagle”) proving that the constellation of the Eagle (Aquila) is one of the most stable ones in history. Originating from the Babylonian epoch (carrying a king towards the sky), it was taken over by the Greeks, Romans, and Arabs. The star name Deneb comes from the Arabic word “dhanab”, meaning “tail”, and refers to the Greek constellation of The Bird that is interpreted in the Roman tradition as a Swan (Cygnus), and as a Hen in the Arabic world. The third star name, Vega, comes from the Arabic “Al-Nasr Al-Waqi”, meaning “The Swooping Eagle'', because the indigenous (pre-Islamic) Arabic culture had a second eagle in the area of the Greek constellation Lyra. In the Early Modern Age, some Christian astronomers, inspired by the Arabic tradition, depicted this constellation as an eagle or vulture holding a lyre. The image also shows a range of other constellations, including Delphinus, Sagitta, and Vulpecula. According to Greek mythology, Sagitta, The Arrow, carried the god of light and the goddess of fertility. In winter they set in the evening but in spring they rise again in the east, and are present for longer and longer in order to make the land fruitful and agriculture successful.
Credit: Kouij Ohnishi/IAU OAO

Glosar de termeni: Asterism
Categories: Naked Eye Astronomy

License: Creative Commons Atribuire 4.0 Internațional (CC BY 4.0) Creative Commons Atribuire 4.0 Internațional (CC BY 4.0) icons

This file on Zenodo ( image 18.48 MB)