Pisces
Pisces is a Zodiacal constellation otherwise known as the Fishes. It is one of the 48 Greek constellations originally described by the 2nd century astronomer Claudius Ptolemy (Wikipedia). Pisces remains one of the 88 modern constellations defined by the International Astronomical Union (Wikipedia).
Pisces (abbrev. = Psc; genitive = Piscium) covers 889 square degrees or 2.16% of the celestial sphere making it the 14th largest constellation. It contains 150 stars brighter than apparent magnitude 6.5, the brightest star being Eta Piscium. See the Pisces Star Chart for a figure illustrating this constellation including the identification of its brighter stars. Note that the two bright stars in the upper left corner of the image above belong to the constellation Aries.
For more information see the entries for Pisces at Wikipedia and U. Wisconsin. For a chart of Pisces, see Psc (IAU).
Technical Details
- Object: Pisces
- Date/Time: 2012 Dec 03 at 02:43 UTC
- Location: Bifrost Astronomical Observatory, Portal, AZ
- Mount: Losmandy G-11 German Equatorial Mount
- Lens: Nikkor AI 28mm f/2
- Camera: Canon EOS 550D (Rebel T2i)
- Field of View: 43.4° x 29.8° at 30.1 arc-sec/pixel (web version: 169 arc-sec/pixel)
- Exposure: 2 x 360, f/2.8, ISO 800 and 120s, f/2.8, ISO 800 with Cokin A830 Diffusion Filter
- File Name: Psc-01w.jpg
- Processing (Adobe Camera Raw): Vignetting Correction, Noise Reduction, White Balance, Curves
- Processing (Photoshop CS5): Average Images, 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.