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The position of the star lies less than 1° away from the north celestial pole, making it the current northern pole star. The stable position of the star in the Northern Sky makes it useful for navigation. [17] As the closest Cepheid variable its distance is used as part of the cosmic distance ladder.
Alioth is the brightest star of Ursa Major and the 33rd-brightest in the sky, with a magnitude of 1.76. It is also the brightest of the chemically peculiar Ap stars , magnetic stars whose chemical elements are either depleted or enhanced, and appear to change as the star rotates.
The Whirlpool Galaxy, also known as Messier 51a (M51a) or NGC 5194, is an interacting grand-design spiral galaxy with a Seyfert 2 active galactic nucleus. [6] [7] [8] It lies in the constellation Canes Venatici, and was the first galaxy to be classified as a spiral galaxy. [9]
Due to the precession of the equinoxes (as well as the stars' proper motions), the role of North Star has passed from one star to another in the remote past, and will pass in the remote future. In 3000 BC, the faint star Thuban in the constellation Draco was the North Star, aligning within 0.1° distance from the celestial pole, the closest of ...
Of particular note among these stars are "the dog star" Sirius, the brightest star in the sky, and four stars of the easily identified constellation Orion. Equatorial stars of the western hemisphere The equatorial region of the celestial sphere's western hemisphere includes 13 navigational stars from Gienah in the constellation Corvus to Markab ...
Seventh brightest star in the night sky. Canopus (α Carinae) 73.3 [97] AD Second brightest star in the night sky. Gacrux (γ Crucis) 73 [98] L/T eff: Twenty-sixth brightest star in the night sky. Polaris (α Ursae Minoris) 46.27 ± 0.42 [99] AD The current star in the North Pole. It is a Classical Cepheid variable, and the brightest example of ...
Capella was the brightest star in the night sky from 210,000 years ago to 160,000 years ago, at about −1.8 in apparent magnitude. At −1.1, Aldebaran was brightest before this period; it and Capella were situated rather close to each other in the sky and approximated boreal pole stars at the time. [35] Building J (foreground) at Monte Albán
The most famous deep-sky object in Andromeda is the spiral galaxy cataloged as Messier 31 (M31) or NGC 224 but known colloquially as the Andromeda Galaxy for the constellation. [53] M31 is one of the most distant objects visible to the naked eye, 2.2 million light-years from Earth (estimates range up to 2.5 million light-years). [ 54 ]