Cassiopeia
Cassiopeia is a Northern Hemisphere constellation otherwise known as the Seated Queen. It is one of the 48 Greek constellations originally described by the 2nd century astronomer Claudius Ptolemy (Wikipedia). Cassiopeia remains one of the 88 modern constellations defined by the International Astronomical Union (Wikipedia).
Cassiopeia (abbrev. = Cas; genitive = Cassiopeiae) covers 598 square degrees or 1.45% of the celestial sphere making it the 25th largest constellation. It contains 157 stars brighter than apparent magnitude 6.5, the brightest star being Shedir. See the Cassiopeia Star Chart for a figure illustrating this constellation including the identification of its brighter stars.
For more information see the entries for Cassiopeia at Wikipedia and U. Wisconsin. For a chart of Cassiopeia, see Cas (IAU).
Technical Details
- Object: Cassiopeia
- Date/Time: 2012 Feb 25 at 03:35 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/2.8, ISO 800 and 120s, f/2.8, ISO 800 with Cokin A830 Diffusion Filter
- File Name: Cas-01w.jpg
- Processing (Adobe Camera Raw): Color Balance, Vignetting, Noise Reduction
- Processing (Photoshop CS5): Curves, Layers
- 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.