Monday, April 16, 2012
Unknown
The name "Sirius" is derived from ancient Greek Seirios ("brightness"). What our eye perceives as a single star is actually a binary star: Sirius A and Sirius B A1V (A) / DA2 (B). These two stars are visible in the video below. In my video, I think the B star is on the left side of the A, because the elongation is repetitive on the same spot, over and over.
Distance that separates the two stars, varies between 8.1 and 31.5 AU.
Sirius appears brighter, because its proximity to Earth. Sirius binary system is one of Earth's closest neighbors. Sirius A is about twice as massive as the Sun and has an absolute visual magnitude of 1.42. Is 25 times brighter than the Sun, but has a lower luminosity than other bright stars such as Canopus or Rigel.
The system is old, between 200 and 300 million years. It was originally composed of two bright bluish stars. Sirius B, consumed its resources, and has become a red giant and threw up its outer layers becoming a white dwarf around 120 million years ago.
Sirius can be seen from almost every inhabited region of the Earth's surface. The best time of year to see it, is around 1 January.
The two stars, Sirius A and Sirius B, revolve around each other are constantly exchanging particles between them. Due to higher density and magnetic field, Sirius B takes the lion's part, taking gases and materials from her host star.
Every 49.9 years, Sirius A and B, come as close together as their orbits allow, and creating huge magnetic storms between them. The more closer to each other, the more they begin to rotate faster around each other, and eventually change places.
The video captures of this video can be seen here: Sirius B pictures through the telescope Observational astronomy .
Video: Victor Lupu
Optical Telescope Celestron C8" Newtonian, super plossl 20mm, 2x Barlow
Mount: CG5 (EQ5)
Camera: Sony CX130
Video mode: 1920x1080 progressive
Filter: no
Date: 27/02/2012
Location: Baia Mare, Romania
Processing and Editing - Sony Vegas 10
Posted in: Stars,Stars-Sirius
1 comments:
Hi, Victor. Thanks for your recent video of Sirius. Just wanted to let you know that a friend and I were amazed by the show that Sirius put on here outside Canberra, Australia a couple nights ago around midnight. For us it was a "UFO" that we tried to explain to ourselves in various ways. However, after a bit of online research and a look at a local night sky map for May in southeastern Australia, I've concluded that what we were seeing was Sirius. Your video was the best I could find that represented the beauty of the star without recourse to mysticism. Cheers from us down here in "Oz". Naomi
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