Observing With NASA 4

This is a picture of the Ring Nebula.

I processed this picture by adjusting the 3 images taken for me using the Linear and then Auto button. After that I reduced the noise of each one and then I changed each picture into a different color which were red, blue and green. I then converted the images into a stack and aligned the 3 pictures together after pressing the Shift button and then I converted them into an RGB.

Some facts about the Ring Nebula: Also known as M57, this nebula can be found in the constellation Lyra. In the middle of this nebula lies a white dwarf. The ring was caused by a red giant star dying and expelling all its gas into space. Even though there is no star in the nebula, it is still 200 times more luminous than our Sun.

APOD 4.5

Found in the constellation Ursa Major, this 46 million light year far spiral galaxy can be found. Called NGC 2841, this galaxy has a very bright nucleus and a gorgeous galactic disk. When you look at the arms of the galaxy, you can see that there are parts that are pink and blue. The pink spots are where stars are being formed and the blue is really young blue star clusters. This galaxy is over 150,000 light years wide which is even bigger than the Milky Way Galaxy!

Zooniverse

In the Zooniverse website, I am doing the Explore the Red Planets project. This project is used to help scientists identify and measure the features on Mar's surface.

Biography of Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin

Chelsea Chacko

Percival

Astronomy Period 5

April 19, 2014
                                            
                                     Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin Biography

      Being a woman back in the 1900s was not very easy. The majority following and believing the ideal that every woman should be at home and taking care of children, looked down on women who dared venture from this. This, however, did not stop Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin. Being the one to reveal that hydrogen was the most abundant element in the universe and known for her work with her husband on finding and measuring variable stars, Cecilia would prove that females could be just as passionate than men about their jobs.
      Born on May 10, 1900 in Wendover, England, Cecilia Helena Payne would find herself to be the eldest of three siblings under the care of her parents Edward John and Emma Helena Payne. Unfortunately, at the age of 4 her dad passed away, leaving her mother to influence her greatly in the classics which she loved throughout her life. In her early age, Cecilia came to know Latin and became fluent in French and German and had an interest in botany and algebra. She was also very influenced by the works of Isaac Newton, Thomas Huxley and Emmanuel Swedenborg.
      In 1919, Cecilia received a scholarship to attend Cambridge University where she pursued botany, chemistry and physics. While she was there, she became friends with a British astronomer named Stanley Eddington who introduced her to astronomy through his public lecture about the 1919 solar eclipse and Einstein's theory of relativity. He took her as a tutorial student and invited her to use the Cambridge Observatory's library which held all the latest astronomical journals. She completed her studies in 1923, however, at that time, women were not granted degrees in Cambridge so she received a Pickering Fellowship from Harvard, which had the world's largest archive of stellar spectra analyzing the , to work under Harlow Shapley who was the director of the Harvard Observatory.
     Her career at Harvard began in 1925 where Shapley became her thesis adviser. She would soon be the first awarded doctorate for her research at the Observatory, and the first to receive a doctorate in astronomy from Radcliffe. One of her passionate areas was astrophysics. The study of spectra actually made astrophysics. in1859, Gustav Kirchoff and Robert Bunsen found that each element has its own set of spectral lines. Comparing the stellar spectral lines with spectral lines of the chemical elements, astronomers found that heavy elements made a lot of the spectral lines and so they assumed that heavy elements made up the star completely. At Harvard, Annie Cannon sorted the spectra of over a hundred thousand stars into seven classes based on their different spectral characteristics. Many thought that the classes were due to the decreasing surface temperature of the stars but Cecilia, who studied quantum physics, understood that the patterns of the spectrum were due to the configuration of the electrons. She knew that at high temperatures electrons would be detached from the atom and create an ion, this was the first research done that used the Indian physicist Saha's recent theory of ionization. Cecilia began to measure the absorption lines in the stellar spectra and showed that the wide variation in it was due to the different ionization states of the atoms therefore due to the different surface temperatures of the stars, not from the different amount of elements. She calculated the amount of 18 elements in stars and revealed that the composition was almost the same in different types of stars. Cecilia also discovered that Sun, as well as many other stars are made up mostly of hydrogen and helium and that the heavier elements only made up for less than 2% of the mass of the star. This research became her doctorial thesis while she soon turned into a book called Stellar Atmospheres which was accepted by many astronomers. Cecilia taught people how to read the spectrum of any star to find its surface temperature. She explained that Cannon's ordering of the stellar spectral classes was based on a sequence of decreasing temperature and that she was able to calculate the temperatures. So now, the Hertzsprung-Russell diagram could be read and understood.
      Cecilia became the youngest scientist in the American Men of Science in 1926 but it was not until 1938, when she married a Russian-born astronomer Sergei Gaposchkin, that her work was recognized and received the title of Philips Astronomer. Getting married proved to be a great advantage for Cecilia. She did have three children, Edward, Katherine and Peter, Katherine being the one to pursue astronomy as well and help with her parents' research, however this did not keep her down; in fact, Cecilia continued to work even with having to take care of her children. Cecilia and Sergei both began to work together and became known for their research of variable stars, including pulsating variables, exploding stars, eclipsing binaries and rotating stars, as well as their research of the structure of a star. Both of them researched the structure of the Milky Way and the Magellanic Clouds, which are nearby galaxies; they discovered over two million estimates of variable stars' magnitudes in the Magellanic Clouds.
      Throughout the rest of her life, Cecilia continued to prove herself as an outstanding astronomer as she was the first woman to become a professor at Harvard and would soon head Harvard's Department of Astronomy from 1956 to 1960. While she was still a student at Cambridge in1923, she was elected to the Royal Astronomical Society and as well as the American Astronomical Society. In 1934, She received the Annie J. Cannon Prize due to her contributions to astronomy and in 1936 she became a member of the American Philosophical Society. Her recognition does not stop there as she doctorates of science from Wilson College, Smith College, Western College, Colby College and Women's Medical College of Philadelphia. Still winning many more awards and medals, Cecilia was also the first woman to receive the Henry Norris Russell Prize of the American Astronomical Society in 1976 and in 1977 a minor planet was named after her. Her contributions can still be seen in the 150 papers, monographs such as "The Stars of High Luminosity", and many books and textbooks she wrote such as Variable Stars, Stars in the Making and Stars and Clusters. Editing publication of the Harvard Observatory for 20 years and becoming an Emeritus Professor there, Cecilia would continue to write and research until her death, all proving that see was one of the greatest women astronomers in history.

Observation 4.4

Date: April 19, 2014

Observation:
Before I get into this picture, I would like to state that this picture was actually taken in March. If you can look at the sky in the picture you might notice one constellation, Orion. You are able to see Orion's Belt on the top right and corner but I did not point it out in the second picture because I did not find it necessary.

Anyways, I have previously talked about the constellation Canis Minor, or the Little Dog but I never realized that I never talked about its companion Canis Major, also called Big Dog. (You can obviously see Canis Major easier than you can with Canis Minor. There is a star that I pointed out which is the star Sirius. This star is also very bright in the sky and if you noticed, the stars in Orion's Belt is pointing right at it! If you can recall, I have always looked at Orion's Belt as the Three Wise Men who were on their way to see Baby Jesus and the star Sirius represented the bright star that they followed to get there. Just another interpretation of the stars.

The story of Canis Major is fairly short and simple in that it is the other guard dog of Orion and that it too was on the pursuit to capture Lepus the Hare which is found under Orion. And that's it.


Now the constellation I would like to bring to your attention is Monoceros, the Unicorn, which is placed right in between Canis Minor and Canis Major. Not many people know or can actually see this constellation because it doesn't have any bright stars. But what this constellation does have in it, is the Rosette Nebula. This nebula is the home to many new stars and its expansion caused the formation of neighboring clusters.

The sad thing about Monoceros is that it was just a gap filler in the skies. Every portion of the sky has its own constellation just to ease the pain of trying to find stellar objects in the sky and space. So although this constellation has no story behind it, a unicorn was chosen for this spot because a unicorn appears several times in the Old Testament of the Bible.

Well, that is it for now! Keep looking up!

APOD 4.4

If you were in the western hemisphere and if you were up at 3 AM on April 15th, then you would have possibly seen a total lunar eclipse, the first one of the year! This picture was taken in the Caribbean island of Barbados the Moon was in Earth's shadow for a whole hour. You can see that underneath the Moon is the star Spica which is in the constellation Virgo and the bright star to the right would be the planet Mars which was nearing opposition which means that Mars will be the brightest this year.

The reason why the Moon is reddish during a total lunar eclipse is because this is when the Sun, Earth and the Moon are in opposition. With the Sun directly behind Earth, the sunlight is still scattered due to Earth's atmosphere and gives it a red hue. This red light is then reflected on the Moon which makes the Moon reddish-orangeish. Here is a picture of what I am trying to explain:

This picture would be a better representation of the Moon during the eclipse:

Observing with NASA 3

This picture is of the Pinwheel Galaxy.

Since this is only one picture, I took it and adjusted the image taken for me using the Log and then Auto button. After that I reduced the noise of it.

This galaxy is actually in the constellation Ursa Major and is also known as Messier 101 or M101. This type of galaxy is a spiral galaxy and is 70% larger than the Milky Way Galaxy! It is also 21 million light years from Earth which means that this picture that you are seeing, which was taken last night, is how the galaxy looked 21 million years ago... That is absolutely crazy!

Observation 4.3

You can really see the rainbow around the Sun.

Don't mind my hair in this photo. The Sun looks black in this picture!*

Date: April 16, 2014

Observation:
Guess what I saw when I was at school today?

A rainbow around the Sun? Well, yes but more specifically, a sun halo. This ring is formed when the sunlight passes through cirrus clouds (which you can see in the first picture). Since clouds hold ice crystals, which are basically drops of water that stick onto the dust particles in the atmosphere, the crystals bend the sunlight and create a rainbow (just as a prism bends light and creates a rainbow). Here is a little secret. You can see this halo anytime or anywhere in the world.

How?

Well, if you are positioned 22 degrees from the Sun you can see the halo! It is more common to see these halos in the fall, winter and spring. So next time, if there ever happens to be cirrus clouds in the sky, try to see if you can see a sun halo and show others too!

Keep looking up!

*The Sun is not really black, it just appears that way through the picture.

Observing With NASA 2

This image that I processed is the Orion Nebula.

Like the previous picture, I adjusted the 3 images taken for me using the Log and then Auto button. After that I reduced the noise of each one and then I changed each picture into a different color which were red, blue and green. I then converted the images into a stack and aligned the 3 pictures together after pressing the Shift button and then I converted them into an RGB.

Some facts about the Orion Nebula is that it is obviously in the constellation Orion, more specifically Orion's belt. It is also given the name Messier 42 or M42. It is also the closest massive star formation region to Earth. Awesome right?

APOD 4.3

Tonight, the planet Mars will be between opposition (April 8) and its closet approach (April 14) with Earth this year! What is opposition? Well, that is when the Earth and a planet, in this case Mars, are aligned with the Sun. You can find Mars near the constellation Virgo and you should really take the time to try look at Mars through a telescope because it is so close. The only problem with Mars being in its position is that the Moon today is also almost full which means that it is reflecting a lot of light, outshining the other planets and stars. 

This picture was taken in Brazil with a high-speed camera and a 16-inch diameter telescope. You can see that there are whitish orographic clouds where water vapor clouds are condensing in the cold atmosphere above the Mar's volcanoes. It is amazing on how clearly you can see Mars and its variety of colors and climates. 

Some of you might wonder why isn't Mars's opposition and its closest approach on the same day! Well, the reason why they are different is because all the planets have somewhat of an elliptical orbit which also vary in size and position in relation to the Sun. But what is so special about the day of Mars' closest approach is that it is also the day in which there is a total eclipse of the Moon. So make sure you look up!

Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin Biography Sources

1. http://biography.yourdictionary.com/cecilia-payne-gaposchkin
2. http://science.howstuffworks.com/dictionary/famous-scientists/astronomers/cecilia-helena-payne-gaposchkin-info.htm
3. http://www.amnh.org/education/resources/rfl/web/essaybooks/cosmic/p_payne.html

Contributions to Understanding the Milky Way

It always amazes me how we are able to know so much about our universe. Just the fact that we were able to find so much information even before setting a foot into outer space just boggles my mind! Well, if it weren't for some certain people, none of these things would have been. With the help of renowned astronomers such as Galileo, William Herschel, Harlow Shapley, Edwin Hubble, Immanuel Kant, Henrietta Leavitt, and Heber Curtis, we were able to understand more of the structure and nature of our galaxy, as well as others.

Galileo
Galileo contributed information about the Milky Way through his use of telescopes pointed towards the skies. Using his telescopes, Galileo was able to see stars which were too faint to the unaided eye. With this new found information, he attempted to put all the stars he knew and found into star systems. These new, "invisible" stars that he found seemed to be very important to understanding nebulae and the Milky Way. Now, instead of just thinking that the Milky Way some sort of painting in the skies from the gods, Galileo began to think that the Milky Way was actually a view of the very far stars from Earth. Overall, Galileo's contribution was verifying that the Milky Way is made up of stars.

William Herschel
William Herschel's contribution to understanding the nature of the Milky Way was finding the shape of the Milky Way. Being interested in finding nebulae, Herschel thought that some were in separate galaxies. When he discovered one of the many nebulae having a star in its center, he proved wrong the theory that nebulae were not able to hold stars in them. Trying to search for more information about these stellar objects, Herschel went to make bigger and bigger telescopes. Thinking that the Milky Way was a nebula, he wanted to find out how it was shaped. He accomplished this by measuring the distances to as many stars as he could which he found to be in a circular band around the sky suggesting a disk shape. He also tried to find the thickness of the Milky Way, however, he had no way of measuring the actual distances, at least accurately. With the help of Herschel, we are now able to understand that our galaxy is the shape of a flat disk with a bulge in the center.

Harlow Shapley
Shapley believed that everything in space was located inside our own galaxy which he thought was 300,000 light years in diameter. He believed that the Sun was not at the center of the galaxy (he thought it was 50,000 light years away from the center) and said that spiral nebulae were actually as clouds inside the Milky Way as well. Shapley went on finding the size of the Milky Way by observing globular clusters. He thought that all globular clusters were around the same size and used their size to find out how far away they were. He made the discovery that the center of the globular distribution is where the center of the galaxy is.

Edwin Hubble
Hubble was one of the few who believed that the spiral nebulae were not in the Milky Way but rather they were other entire galaxies outside our own. He tried to prove this by making a reflector telescope which allowed him to see the star in the Andromeda Galaxy. But to prove that it was another galaxy, instead of a nebulae, Hubble had to try to find its distance. He found the distance by using the Cepheid variables in the Andromeda Galaxy which he used to find that this "nebulae" was 25x farther away than most stars in the Milky Way. Soon in 1925, Hubble also made a classifying system for the galaxies by their shape such as spiral, elliptical, or irregular. Lastly, Hubble was also the one who proved the expansion of the universe. He saw that the farther the object was, it had more of a redshift. He showed that the redshifts of galaxies meant that they were moving outwards of about thousands of miles per second. He made Hubble's Law which states that redshifts increase in their proportion to their distance away from us. He also made Hubble's constant which is the velocity of a receding galaxy divided by the distance to it.

RR Lyrids and Cepheids
Cepheids are a type of variable stars. A variable star is a star that changes in brightness over a period of time. These types of stars were actually named after the star Delta Cephei which varied in magnitude after 5.367 days. Henrietta Leavitt was the first to notice this type of variable star, most of them found in a near by small companion galaxy called the Small Magellenic Cloud where she observed that the brighter stars took longer to change their brightness. Cepheids are around 1000x the brightness of the Sun and are driven by pulsing. They are rare stellar objects and their period depends on their metallicity. They change in brightness due to expand and contracting. These stars can be used in finding the distances of other galaxies and clusters. An example of this is When Edwin Hubble used the star Delta Cephei to indicate that the Andromeda Galaxy is outside of the Milky Way

RR Lyrae variable stars are the brightest in the variable star group. They are like Cephiads but are less luminous and have a shorter variability period. These stars are old and have a low mass but are more common than Cephiads

Immanuel Kant
Kant agreed with the theory that the Milky Way was a disc of stars but he was the first to suggest that other nebulae could also be discs of stars in 1755. He said that the tiny, dim nebulae were actually other galaxies or  "island universes". Kant also made a nebular hypothesis which explained how our solar system was formed but used it generally to the Milky Way and the universe which expanded the view on how the universe was made and opened up possible ideas that there could be other galaxies.

Henrietta Leavitt
Leavitt, on her way to finding variable stars, she found that the Cepheid variable in the Small Magellanic Cloud were all the same distance from the Earth. She also studied the period-luminosity relationship of these stars which with she was soon able to find that the distance from the stars are up to ten million light years. With the help of Ejnar Hertzsprung, they both were able to find the distances of different stars. With Harlow Shapley they were able to measure the size of the galaxies. Edwin Hubble would use her work to fin the age of the universe.

Heber Curtis
Heber believed that the Sun was near the center of a smaller galaxy and thought that spiral nebulae were galaxies outside the Milky Way. He believed that globular clusters were outside the galaxy but thought that they were much closer to one another. He made a theory that spiral nebulae were similar to the Milky Way using the optical spectrum as proof as the spectrum for the spiral nebula and the galaxy were the exact same. He also thought that the spiral nebulae were large collections of stars far away from the Milky Way.

"The Great Debate"
The Great Debate was also known as the Shapley-Curtis Debate which was a time when astronomers had very different theories on what the structure of the Universe and how it was formed. Harlow Shapley and Heber Curtis both disagreed with each other on how the universe was composed. Harlow believed that everything in the universe was inside our own galaxy while Curtis believed that spiral nebulae were actually outside the Milky Way and were actually other galaxies. They both disagreed on how far away the globular clusters were which Curtis thought was closer and said that our galaxy was smaller than Shapley believed it to be. It was found that Curtis' theory was correct when Edwin Hubble settled the conflict by finding the distance of the Andromeda galaxy. Shapley was correct in saying that the Sun was far from the center of the Milky Way. He was also correct in his estimate of the total size of the Milk Way.

Observation 4.2

Date: April 5, 2014

Observations:
This night I took a picture of Perseus, also known as the Hero. As you can see the arrow is pointing at on of the star Algol which is a second magnitude star (that means it is really bright, with 1 being the brightest) but obviously in this picture Algol does not seem so bright because I was next to a light pole which probably conflicted with the star.

Now for the story of Perseus. As many of you might know, Perseus is part of the soap opera in the sky which includes Andromeda, Cassiopeia and Cepheus.

In Greek myth, Perseus was the son of Danaë, daughter of King Acrisius of Argos. Acrisius had locked Danaë away in a heavily guarded dungeon when an oracle foretold that he would be killed by his grandson. But Zeus visited Danaë in the form of a shower of golden rain that fell through the skylight of the dungeon into her lap and impregnated her. When Acrisius found out, he locked Danaë and the infant Perseus into a wooden chest and cast them out to sea.

Inside the bobbing chest Danaë clutched her child and prayed to Zeus for deliverance from the sea. A few days later, the chest washed ashore on the island of Seriphos, its cargo still alive but starved and thirsty. A fisherman, Dictys, broke the chest open and found the mother and child. Dictys brought up Perseus as his own son.                 

            

The brother of Dictys was King Polydectes, who coveted Danaë as a wife. But Danaë was reluctant and Perseus, now grown to manhood, defended her from the king’s advances. Instead, King Polydectes hatched a plan to get rid of Perseus. The king pretended he had turned his attentions to Hippodameia, daughter of King Oenomaus of Elis. King Polydectes asked his subjects, including Perseus, to provide horses for a wedding present. Perseus had no horse to give, nor money to buy one, so Polydectes sent him to bring the head of Medusa the Gorgon.

 

The Gorgons were three hideously ugly sisters called Euryale, Stheno and Medusa. They were the daughters of Phorcys, a god of the sea, and his sister Ceto. The Gorgons had faces covered with dragon scales, tusks like boars, hands of brass and wings of gold. Their evil gaze turned to stone anyone who set eyes on them. Euryale and Stheno were immortal, but Medusa was mortal. She was distinguishable from the others because she had snakes for hair. In her youth Medusa had been famed for her beauty, particularly that of her hair, but she was condemned to a life of ugliness by Athene in whose temple she had been ravished by Poseidon.                 

            

A Gorgon’s head would be a powerful weapon for a tyrannical king to enforce his rule, but King Polydectes probably thought that Perseus would die in his attempt to obtain it. However, the king had reckoned without Perseus’s family connections among the gods. Athene gave him a bronze shield which he carried on his left arm, while in his right hand he wielded a sword of diamond made by Hephaestus. Hermes gave him winged sandals, and on his head he wore a helmet of darkness from Hades that made him invisible.

                       

Under the guidance of Athene, Perseus flew to the slopes of Mount Atlas where the sisters of the Gorgons, called the Graeae, acted as lookouts. The Graeae were poorly qualified for the task, since they had only one eye between the three of them, which they passed to each other in turn. Perseus snatched the eye from them and threw it into Lake Tritonis.

            

He then followed a trail of statues of men and animals who had been turned to stone by the gaze of the Gorgons. Unseen in his helmet of invisibility, Perseus crept up on the Gorgons and waited until night when Medusa and her snakes were asleep. Looking only at her reflection in his brightly polished shield, Perseus swung his sword and decapitated Medusa with one blow. As Medusa’s head rolled to the ground, Perseus was startled to see the winged horse Pegasus and the armed warrior Chrysaor spring fully grown from her body, the legacy of her youthful affair with Poseidon. (Pegasus is commemorated in a constellation of its own.) Perseus rapidly collected up Medusa’s head, put it in a pouch and flew away before the other Gorgons awoke.

            

Drops of blood fell from the head and turned into serpents as they struck the sands of Libya below. Strong winds blew Perseus across the sky like a raincloud, so he stopped to rest in the kingdom of Atlas. When Atlas refused him hospitality, Perseus took out the Gorgon’s head and turned him into the range of mountains that now bear his name.

            

The following morning Perseus resumed his flight with new vigor, coming to the land of King Cepheus whose daughter Andromeda was being sacrificed to a sea monster. Perseus’s rescue of the girl, one of the most famous themes of mythology, is told in detail under the entry for Andromeda. Perseus returned with Andromeda to the island of Seriphos, where he found his mother and Dictys sheltering in a temple from the tyranny of King Polydectes. Perseus stormed into the king’s palace to a hostile reception. Reaching into his pouch, Perseus brought out the head of Medusa, turning Polydectes and his followers to stone. Perseus appointed Dictys king of Seriphos. Athene took the head of Medusa and set it in the middle of her shield.

            

Incidentally, the prophecy that had started all these adventures – namely, that Acrisius would be killed by his grandson – eventually came to pass during an athletics contest when a discus thrown by Perseus accidentally hit Acrisius, one of the spectators, and killed him. Perseus and Andromeda had many children, including Perses, whom they gave to Cepheus to bring up. From Perses, the kings of Persia were said to have been descended. 

 

 In the sky, Perseus lies next to his beloved Andromeda. Nearby are her parents Cepheus and Cassiopeia, as well as the monster, Cetus, to which she was sacrificed. Pegasus the winged horse completes the tableau. Perseus himself is shown holding the Gorgon’s head (Algol).

Observing With NASA 1

This is the Trifid Nebula M20

This photo was actually taken 2 weeks ago specifically for me. Actually this photo is consisted of 3 separate photos that were processed and stacked together using the MircoObservatoryImageWindows2.3.

The way that I processed it was I took the 3 photos of the nebula that I requested and I adjusted the images using the Log and then Auto button. After that I reduced the noise of each one and then converted the images into a stack. I then aligned the 3 pictures together by pressing Shift and then I converted them into an RGB.

A little information about the Trifid Nebula M20 is that it is in the constellation Sagittarius. The red glow is from light hitting the hydrogen gas. The nebula can also be seen with good binoculars at night.

APOD 4.2

These two bright stars in the sky will be seen together for the next few months. The reddish "star" is actually the planet Mars and it will continue to get brighter as Earth and Mars get closer together on their orbit around the Sun. Spica is the bluish star, however, it is constantly one of the brightest blue star in the sky. What is amazing is that this star has been seen throughout human history, all the way back to ancient times.

The reason why Mars appears to be reddish is because of its soil. It is found that Mar's soil is abundant in iron which gives it a reddish tint. It is not completely known why it has so much iron in it but some possible explanations are that once there was warm water flowing on Mars which carved out long channels through the planets. The rocks with iron would have slowly been worn away by the rivers and the sea, and the oxygen in the water would have combined with the iron and make iron oxide which would have made the iron rust and turn into red dust. The mineral would then be dispersed throughout the planet through rain. Another explanation would be that the iron came from meteorites that have hit Mars in the past. Whatever it is, Mars is still one very beautiful and mysterious planet.

Spica is seen as blue because it is a blue giant! It is actually a binary star, which means that it revolves around a common, central point with another stellar object, yet they are so close together, the two stars are not easy to see. Another reason why it is so bright is because it is one of the nearest massive binary star systems to the Sun; that and the fact that it is 10 times the mass of the Sun, 7 times the radius of the Sun and 12,100 times the luminosity of the Sun... no big deal.

Other information about this photo is that it was taken last week in Sweden. Who says you can't be creative for astronomy?