Aries - 1
Aries is a Zodiacal constellation otherwise known as the Ram. It is one of the 48 Greek constellations originally described by the 2nd century astronomer Claudius Ptolemy (Wikipedia). Aries remains one of the 88 modern constellations defined by the International Astronomical Union (Wikipedia).
Aries (abbrev. = Ari; genitive = Arietis) covers 441 square degrees or 1.07% of the celestial sphere making it the 39th largest constellation. It contains 86 stars brighter than apparent magnitude 6.5, the brightest star being Hamal. See the Aries Star Chart for a figure illustrating this constellation including the identification of its brighter stars.
The bright object to the left in the photo above is the planet Jupiter. See Aries 2 for another image of this constellation (without Jupiter).
For more information see the entries for Aries at Wikipedia and U. Wisconsin. For a chart of Aries, see Ari (IAU).
Technical Details
- Object: Aries
- Date/Time: 2012 Feb 23 at 03:22 UTC
- Location: Bifrost Astronomical Observatory, Portal, AZ
- Mount: Losmandy G-11 German Equatorial Mount
- Lens: Nikkor AI 50mm f/1.8
- Camera: Canon EOS 550D (Rebel T2i)
- Field of View: 25.1° x 16.9° at 17.4 arc-sec/pixel (web version: 98 arc-sec/pixel)
- Exposure: 240s, f/4, ISO 800 and 120s, f/4, ISO 800 with Cokin A840 Diffusion Filter
- File Name: Ari-01w.jpg
- Processing (Adobe Camera Raw): Color Balance, Vignetting, Noise Reduction
- Processing (Photoshop CS5): Layers, Curves, opacity (with diffusion image)
- Original Image Size: 3454 × 5179 pixels (17.9 MP); 11.5" x 17.3" @ 300 dpi
- Rights: Copyright 2012 by Fred Espenak. All Rights Reserved. See: Image Licensing.