Arcturus ( a Boo ) - HIP 69673 A

I am not sure if anyone else is able to look in the general direction in the northern hemisphere but it is surely flickering wildly again tonight . I do not have access to a telescope but if anyone on the west coast of North America does , have a look see . If anyone could give a reasonable explanation it would be helpful . Thanks .

RA/DE (12000) 14hr15m39.5s / +19degree10'48.0"

Looking at it with the naked eye it seems to be a single object then it flickers into two different objects in the same area , very odd indeed .

Scintillation or twinkling are generic terms for rapid variations in apparent brightness or color of a distant luminous object viewed through a medium, most commonly the atmosphere (atmospheric scintillation).

en.wikipedia.org...

reply to post by Phage

C'mon Phage you can't quote from Wikipedia...J/K
My professors would freak!

reply to post by samlf3rd

Scintillation: Twinkling of the stars. More generally, scintillation is the rapid variation in apparent position, brightness or color of a distant luminous object when viewed through the Earth's atmosphere.

articles.chicagotribune.com...

Why do stars change their colour constantly every second? red-blue-red-blue..............

This is because of scintillation ("Twinkling") as the light passes through the atmosphere of the Earth. As the air moves in and out, the starlight is refracted, often different colors in different directions. Because of this "chromatic abberation," stars can appear to change colors when they are twinkling strongly.

curious.astro.cornell.edu...

My favorite star! When I'm walking the dog late at night in the winter time, its orange-yellow sparkle is like a herald of warmer days ahead. It also reminds me of someone with whom I was very much in love, long ago...

I suppose my favorite astronomical trivia about Arcturus is that its orbit is perpendicular to the plain of the galaxy. Cosmically, it is diving-through at right-angles to the traffic. This gives it a very high "proper motion" (defined as how fast it moves through our sky, in seconds-of-arc per year). The Romans spoke of stars as fixed and eternal, but since Caesar's time, Arcturus has moved more than twice the diameter of the Moon across the sky. This is a lot - especially when you consider that it is almost 40 light-years away!

reply to post by Saint Exupery

You're not the only one.
Arcturus is the zenith star of Hawaii, used by Polynesian navigators to determine when they had reached the latitude of the islands. Their name for it; hokule`a, star of happiness.

reply to post by Phage


Good man, there's some info!