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With an apparent magnitude that fluctuates around 1.98, [3] it is the brightest star in the constellation and is readily visible to the naked eye at night. [16] The position of the star lies less than 1° away from the north celestial pole, making it the current northern pole star.
A pole star is a visible star that is approximately aligned with the axis of rotation of an astronomical body; that is, a star whose apparent position is close to one of the celestial poles. On Earth , a pole star would lie directly overhead when viewed from the North or the South Pole .
Over the course of an evening in the Northern Hemisphere, circumpolar stars appear to circle around the north celestial pole. Polaris (within 1° of the pole) is the nearly stationary bright star just to the right of center in this star trail photo.
Vega is the brightest star in the northern constellation of Lyra. It has the Bayer designation α Lyrae, which is Latinised to Alpha Lyrae and abbreviated Alpha Lyr or α Lyr. This star is relatively close at only 25 light-years (7.7 parsecs) from the Sun, and one of the most luminous stars in the Sun's neighborhood.
The rotation axis of the Earth describes, over a period of 25,700 years, a small blue circle among the stars near the top of the diagram, centered on the ecliptic north pole (the blue letter E) and with an angular radius of about 23.4°, an angle known as the obliquity of the ecliptic. The direction of precession is opposite to the daily ...
You have just a few weeks left to view the "comet of the century" making its 80,000-year orbit around Earth. ... or the North Star, until Oct. 16. By Oct. 19, its brightness will diminish to about ...
A star chart of the entire Northern Sky, centered on the north celestial pole. The northern celestial hemisphere, also called the Northern Sky, is the northern half of the celestial sphere; that is, it lies north of the celestial equator. This arbitrary sphere appears to rotate westward around a polar axis due to Earth's rotation.
The International Astronomical Union (IAU) defines the north pole of a planet or any of its satellites in the Solar System as the planetary pole that is in the same celestial hemisphere, relative to the invariable plane of the Solar System, as Earth's north pole. [1] This definition is independent of the object's direction of rotation about its ...