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Aquila is a constellation on the celestial equator. Its name is Latin for 'eagle' and it represents the bird that carried Zeus/Jupiter's thunderbolts in Greek-Roman mythology. Its brightest star, Altair, is one vertex of the Summer Triangle asterism. The constellation is best seen in the northern summer, as it is located along the Milky Way.
The defining vertices of this imaginary triangle are at Altair, Deneb, and Vega, each of which is the brightest star of its constellation (Aquila, Cygnus, and Lyra, respectively). The greatest declination is +45° and lowest is +9° meaning the three can be seen from all places in the Northern Hemisphere and from the home of most people ...
This is over 1,400 times the size of the full moon, 55% of the size of the largest constellation, Hydra, and over 10 times the size of the smallest constellation, Crux. Its brightest star, Alpha Andromedae , is a binary star that has also been counted as a part of Pegasus , while Gamma Andromedae is a colorful binary and a popular target for ...
Altair in comparison with the Sun. Along with β Aquilae and γ Aquilae, Altair forms the well-known line of stars sometimes referred to as the Family of Aquila or Shaft of Aquila. [16]: 190 Altair is a type-A main-sequence star with about 1.8 times the mass of the Sun and 11 times its luminosity.
The use of astronomical symbols for the Sun and Moon dates to antiquity. The forms of the symbols that appear in the original papyrus texts of Greek horoscopes are a circle with one ray for the Sun and a crescent for the Moon. [3] The modern Sun symbol, a circle with a dot (☉), first appeared in Europe in the Renaissance. [3]
Somewhere around the 5th century BCE, Babylonian astronomical texts began to describe the positions of the Sun, Moon, and planets in terms of 12 equally-spaced signs, each one associated with a zodiacal constellation, each divided into 30 degrees (uš). This normalized zodiac is fixed to the stars and totals 360 degrees. [7]
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Gamma Aquilae, Latinized from γ Aquilae, and formally known as Tarazed / ˈ t ær ə z ɛ d /, [10] is a star in the constellation of Aquila. It has an apparent visual magnitude of 2.712, [2] making it readily visible to the naked eye at night. Parallax measurements place it at a distance of 395 light-years (121 parsecs) from the Sun. [1]