Ursa Major Family’s Two Bright Neighbors
For the whole month of April and after monitoring Jupiter and 3I/ATLAS, I pointed my telescope around the Big Dipper which I wrote my article (here). Going further from northeast to southeast, you could see two bright neighboring stars from different constellations: Boötes and Virgo. Mostly, they could appear every spring season before ten in the evening.
Have the telescope set on the eastern part of the skies to see the them. Make sure to avoid any other sources of light hindering your sky watching.
Alpha Boötis, aka, Arcturus
Hailing from Boötes constellation, this red giant is the fourth brightest star in the night sky. It has an apparent magnitude of -0.05 which it could be easily spotted with the naked eye and a telescope. Its distance from the sun is about 36.7 light-years.
Arcturus is 7.1 billions years old which it’s almost twice older, bigger, and brighter than our Sun. This aging star and ours have the same mass.
Its name was derived from ancient Greek, Arktouros, meaning “ The Guardian of the Bear. “ It can also be translated as “ The Guardian of the North. “
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For me, Arcturus is Ursa Major’s next door reddish-orange neighbor which he remains very observant and watchful within the warm spring skies.
Alpha Virginis, aka, Spica
This large bluish-white main sequence star from Virgo constellation is one of the 20 brightest stars in the night sky with its apparent magnitude of 0.97. Spica is 250 light-years away from the sun.
As you can see from the images at the top, it appears to be egg-shaped rather than the spherical form. According to astronomers, Spica is a spectroscopic binary system which there are two stars so close together that orbit each other for every four days. We may not expect to have two separate stars like the Ursa Major twins, Mizar and Alcor.
Its name was derived from its Latin roots, meaning “ the virgin’s ear of wheat grain “.
Spica can be slightly distant to the Ursa Major family, but she has extra sensitive ears to hear the siblings quarrel! Kidding aside!
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I’m supposed to add Regulus as a member of the Spring triangle, but it will be discussed further in the next article. As a conclusion, I’ll leave my newly composed haiku about the two interstellar neighbors.
“ Watching on the east,
Big Dipper and two neighbors
Meeting together. “
