Showing posts with label Betelgeuse. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Betelgeuse. Show all posts

7 March 2013

Oh my. This puts it all in perspective wonderfully...

So just how big is the Sun?

Pretty hard to go by this gorgeous picture for summing it up in one:



Yes—those little specs right over on the left side are the four terrestrial planets.

It was done by Bob Riddle, and he has a bunch of related information over on his blog.

Via Brad Snowder (@skywise88).
On the topic of comparisons, did you know that the mass of Jupiter is some 2.4 times the combined mass of every other thing in our Solar System—excluding the Sun. Every planet, moon, ring, asteroid and dust mote. But even that pales next to the Sun. But wait: even the Sun pales next to the size of red super giant Betelguese, which is in our skies at present, in the Orion constellation. If Betelguese was where our Sun is, its surface would be right out past Jupiter's orbit (which is 5.2 Au, or 5.2 times the distance from Earth to the Sun, or 816,520,800 kilometres). Betelguese's radius varies between 950 and 1200 million kilometres. Now that's big...

24 January 2013

Photos from tonight's very bright ISS pass

It was quite windy so I wasn't going to try to take photos of the magnitude -3.3 ISS pass tonight, but at the last moment changed my mind. So it was a rushed setup, plus I was trying to let a few people know via social media. So these photos are heavily cropped to remove a neighbour's treetops, as this was the only place I was semi-sheltered from the wind. And just 10 second shots too, due to the near full moon.

But interesting nonetheless. The first shot was as the space station was passing the Orion Constellation. Those are red supergiants Aldebaran in bottom left and Betelguese in bottom centre. Orion's belt and sword centre top. The stars in those are clearly blue, meaning they are extremely hot. Type O blue stars are typically >33,000 degrees, against Sol's 5770 degrees. (The middle one of the sword is actually the Orion Nebula.)

20130124 ISS

Tricky shooting straight into the moon! Had to boost the black and the contrast to counter the moon's wash-out. That's Betelguese again top centre-left.

20130124 ISS and Moon