Happy hunting! Main navigation Activities. Tags Lifestyle. Product Reviews. Around the Bozone. Inside Bozeman. Bellatrix serves as Orion's left shoulder. Other stars in the constellation include Hatsya, which establishes the tip of Orion's sword that hangs off the belt, and Meissa, which forms Orion's head. Saiph serves as Orion's right knee. Rigel , Orion's brightest star, forms the hunter's left knee. With one exception, all of the main stars in Orion are bright young blue giants or supergiants, ranging in distance from Bellatrix light-years to Alnilam 1, light-years.
The Orion Nebula is located around 1, light-years away from Earth. One light-year is the distance light travels in a single year, about 6 trillion miles 10 trillion kilometers.
The exception is the star Betelgeuse , which is a red giant and one of the largest stars known. It is also the only star in the sky large enough and close enough to have been imaged as a disk in the Hubble Space Telescope. Observers with a keen eye should be able to see the difference in color between Betelgeuse and all the other stars in Orion.
The Orion Constellation is home to many interesting stargazing targets, we explore a handful of them here. Though some of these targets can be seen with the naked eye, for a better view we recommend using binoculars or a telescope.
If you need equipment, our best binoculars and best telescopes guides may help. Magnitude: An object's magnitude tells you how bright an object is as it appears from the Earth.
In astronomy, magnitudes are represented on a numbered scale. Quite confusingly the lower the number, the bright the object. Right ascension RA : Right ascension is to the sky what longitude is to the surface of the Earth, corresponding to east and west directions.
The child became a very handsome and strong man. He was such a good hunter that he was hired by the king Oenopion to kill the ferocious beasts that were terrifying the habitants of the island Chios. Happy for his success, Orion said he would kill all the wild animals on the earth.
Then, Gaia set an enormous scorpion on Orion. The constellation is also known as the Hunter, as it is associated with one in Greek mythology. It represents the mythical hunter Orion, who is often depicted in star maps as either facing the charge of Taurus , the bull, pursuing the Pleiades sisters, represented by the famous open cluster, or chasing after the hare constellation Lepus with his two hunting dogs, represented by the nearby constellations Canis Major and Canis Minor.
Orion is the 26th constellation in size, occupying an area of square degrees. It is one of the 15 equatorial constellations. The brightest star in the constellation is Rigel , Beta Orionis, with an apparent magnitude of 0. Rigel is also the sixth brightest star in the sky. The second brightest star in Orion, Betelgeuse , Alpha Orionis, has an apparent magnitude of 0.
The constellation Orion contains 10 formally named stars. There are two meteor showers associated with Orion, the Orionids and the Chi Orionids. The Orionid meteor shower reaches its peak around October 21 every year. In Greek mythology, the hunter Orion was the most handsome of men. In one myth, Orion fell in love with the Pleiades , the seven sisters, daughters of Atlas and Pleione.
He started pursuing them and Zeus scooped them up and placed them in the sky. The Pleiades are represented by the famous star cluster of the same name, located in the constellation Taurus. Orion can still be seen chasing the sisters across the sky at night.
One night, he had too much to drink and tried to force himself on her. Hephaestus felt sorry for the blind, wandering Orion and offered one of his assistants to guide the hunter and act as his eyes. Orion eventually encountered an oracle that told him if he went east toward the sunrise, his sight would be restored.
Orion did so and his eyes were miraculously healed. The constellation Orion has its origins in Sumerian mythology, specifically in the myth of Gilgamesh. Sumerians associated it with the story of their hero fighting the bull of heaven, represented by Taurus. Orion is often shown as facing the charge of a bull, yet there are no myths in Greek mythology telling any such tale.
However, since Heracles, the most famous of Greek heroes, is represented by the much less conspicuous constellation Hercules , and since one of his tasks was to catch the Cretan bull, there are at least hints of a possible connection between the two. In one tale, Orion boasted to the goddess Artemis and her mother Leto that he could defeat any beast on earth. The Earth Goddess heard him and sent a scorpion, which stung the giant. In another story, he tried to force himself on Artemis and she was the one who sent the scorpion.
In yet another account, Orion was stung while trying to save Leto from the scorpion. However, there is also a myth that does not involve a scorpion: Artemis, the goddess of hunting, fell in love with the hunter and, to stop her from giving up her vows of chastity, her brother Apollo dared her to hit a small target in the distance with her bow and arrow.
Not knowing that the target was Orion, who was enjoying a swim, she hit it on the first try. Devastated by his passing, she placed Orion among the stars. Orion is a well-known constellation in many cultures.
Babylonians knew Orion as MUL. Egyptians associated it with Osiris. Orion was also identified with Unas, the last Pharaoh of the Fifth Dynasty, who was said to have eaten the flesh of his enemies and devoured the gods themselves to become great and bring inheritance of his power. According to myth, Unas travels through the sky to become the star Sabu, or Orion. Because pharaohs were believed to be transformed into Osiris after their passing, some of the greatest pyramids — the ones at Giza — were built to mirror the pattern of the stars in the constellation.
Also captured is the red supergiant Betelgeuse top left and the famous belt of Orion composed of the OB stars Alnitak, Alnilam and Mintaka. To the bottom right can be found the star Rigel. The photograph appeared as the Astronomy Picture of the Day on October 23, In Hungarian mythology, Orion is identified with Nimrod, a famous hunter and father of Hunor and Magor, the two twins also known as Hun ad Hungarian. The Chinese knew the constellation as Shen, a great hunter or warrior.
Another ancient legend dates back to the second millennium BC. The Hittites a Bronze Age people of Anatolia, the region comprising most of present-day Turkey associated the constellation with Aqhat, a famous mythical hunter. The war goddess Anat fell in love with him, but after he refused to lend her his bow, she tried to steal it.
However, the man she sent to get the bow botched the assignment pretty badly, doing away with Aqhat and dropping the bow into the sea. This is why, according to the myth, the constellation drops below the horizon for two months in the spring. Rigel is the brightest star in the constellation. With an apparent magnitude of 0. Even though it does not have the designation alpha, it is almost always brighter than Betelgeuse , Alpha Orionis.
Rigel is really a star system composed of three stars. It has been a known visual binary since , possibly even earlier, when F. Struve first measured it. Rigel is surrounded by a shell of expelled gas. Rigel is a blue supergiant. It belongs to the spectral type B8lab and is It has 85, times the luminosity of the Sun and 17 solar masses. It is classified as a slightly irregular variable star, with its luminosity varying from 0. The primary component in the system, Rigel A, is times brighter than Rigel B, which is itself a spectroscopic binary star.
Rigel B has a magnitude of 6. It consists of a pair of B9V class main sequence stars that orbit a common centre of gravity every 9.
Rigel, Beta Orionis, is associated with several nearby dust clouds which it illuminates. The most famous one is IC , also known as the Witch Head Nebula , a faint reflection nebula located about 2. Rigel is a member of the Taurus-Orion R1 Association. It was considered by some to be an outlying member of the Orion OB1 Association, a group of several dozen hot giants belonging to the spectral types O and B, located in the Orion Molecular Cloud Complex.
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