Aquarius Essay, Research Paper
Aquarius
Aquarius can be found in the SE sky in autumn, especially October. A
dark night is especially helpful because many faint stars make up Aquarius.
This will help to make the fainter stars stand out because its hard enough to
see a shape in Aquarius. Up and to the west of aquarius, pegasus can be found.
Down and to the east of aquarius, capricorn can be found.
Aquarius portrays a man or boy spilling water from an urn. Aquarius is
identified with Ganymede, a beautiful young shepherd who was abducted by Zeus
and taken to Mount Olympus to be the cup bearer for the gods.
Stars:
Sadalmelik: Arabic for “lucky one of the king”. It lies just off the
celestial equator.
Sudalsud: It means “luckiest of the lucky” in Arabic. It is the
brightest star in the constellation
Sadachbia: Arabic for “lucky star of hidden things” or ” lucky star of
the tents.” This makes up part of the asterism sometimes called the tent, but
is usually called the urn referring to Aquarius.
Skat or Scheat: It comes from the Arabic word for shin and it dates
back to the translation of Ptolemy’s Almagest.
Albali: The name comes from the Arabic, which means “swallower”; no one
really knows why the star got this name
Situla: This name comes from Latin and means “well bucket”. Situla was
the original Arabic name for the entire constellation Aquarius.
There are three star clusters contained in Aquarius. M2, which was
discovered in 1764, is one that can be seen with a small telescope. A larger
telescope is needed to make out the individual stars. M72 is another cluster
that is located southeast of Albali and isn’t far from the Saturn Nebula. NGC
7492 is the third cluster and is located east of Skat.
Aquarius also has two nebulae in it. It is called the Saturn Nebula
because it resembles the rings on Saturn. A very large telescope is needed to
see its rings. It was discovered in 1782 by William Herschel. In a small
telescopes it will appear as faint disks of fuzzy light. It lies southeast of
Albali near the cluster M72. Its central star can be spotted with a large
telescope. The other nebula, NGC 7923 is southwest of Skat and is a well known
Helix Nebula. It is brighter than NGC 7009, the Saturn nebula, but has a
fainter central star.
There are five galaxies in Aquarius but they only appear as fuzzy
patches in amateur telescopes. They are: NGC 7184, NGC 7606, NGC 7721, NGC 7723,
and NGC 7727.