Friday, 16 November, 2018

The Ursa Major Constellation

Posted on Monday, 27 May, 2013Sunday, 20 August, 2017 by Zheluo Cai

The Ursa Major (Great Bear) Constellation

The Big Dipper, which is only a part of the Ursa Major Constellation, forms the tail of the Great Bear. It is probably the best known and easiest group of stars in the heavens to identify in the northern Singapore sky between 8pm to 11pm on a clear night. The two stars, Dubhe and Merak, are the “Pointer Stars,” the line connecting them and extended about six times the distance between them will locate Polaris, the Northern Pole Star, which is very close to the north celestial pole, the point about which the heavens seem to rotate (we cannot see Polaris as it is too low in our horizon, and dimmed out by light pollution). Mizar in the handle of the Big Dipper has a small companion, Alcor, of the 4th magnitude. Separation of the two stars used to be considered a test of keen eyesight since ancient times. Mizar itself is a double star.

The brightest stars in the Ursa Major (UM) Constellation that can be seen by the naked eye are Dubhe, Merak, Phad (Phecda), Megrez, Alioth, Mizar, Alkaid, (ψ)Psi UM, and Tania Australis or (μ)Nu UM, Tania Borealis or (λ) Lambda UM, (θ)Theta UM, Talitha or (ι)Iota UM, and (κ)Kappa UM.

The Ainu, in the historical Japanese texts the Ezo, are an indigenous people of Japan (Hokkaido, and formerly northeastern Honshu) and Russia (Sakhalin, the Kuril Islands, and formerly the Kamchatka Peninsula). On June 6, 2008, the Japanese Diet passed a bipartisan, non-binding resolution calling upon the government to recognize the Ainu people as indigenous to Japan, and urging an end to discrimination against the group. Recent research suggests that the historical Ainu culture originated in a merger of the Okhotsk culture with the Satsumon, one of the ancient archaeological cultures that are considered to have derived from the Jōmon-period cultures of the Japanese archipelago. The Ainu economy was based on farming, as well as on hunting, fishing and gathering.

NGC 2174: Stars Versus Mountains.
Credit: ESA, Hubble, NASA. The energetic light and winds from massive newly formed stars in NGC 2174 are evaporating and dispersing the dark stellar nurseries in which they formed. The structures are actually much thinner than air and only appear as mountains due to relatively small amounts of opaque interstellar dust. A lesser-known sight in the nebula-rich constellation Orion, NGC 2174 can be found near the head of the celestial hunter. About 6,400 light-years distant, the entire glowing cosmic cloud covers an area larger than the full Moon and surrounds loose open clusters of young stars. The image from the Hubble Space Telescope shows a dense interior region which spans only about three light years while adopting a colour map that portrays otherwise red hydrogen emission in green hues and emphasizes sulfur emission in red and oxygen in blue. Within a few million years, the stars will likely win out completely and the entire dust mountain will be dispersed.

The flag of the Netherlands is a horizontal tricolour of red, white, and blue. The tricolour flag is almost identical to that of Luxembourg, except that it is shorter and its red and blue stripes are a darker shade. It originates as a variant of the older orange-white-blue Prinsenvlag (Prince's Flag), introduced in the 17th century as the Statenvlag (States Flag), the naval flag of the States-General of the Dutch Republic. Its official status as the national flag of the Kingdom of the Netherlands was formalized in 1937.

The Last Judgment is a fresco by the Italian Renaissance painter Michelangelo, covering the whole altar wall of the Sistine Chapel in Vatican City. It is a depiction of the Second Coming of Christ and the final and eternal judgment by God of all humanity. There are over 300 figures, with nearly all the males and angels originally shown as nudes; many were later partly covered up by painted draperies. The work took over four years, between 1536 and 1541. Michelangelo began working on it twenty-five years after he finished the Sistine Chapel ceiling, and was nearly 67 at its completion. It was commissioned by Pope Clement VII but was completed under Pope Paul III.

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