|
From SPACE.com:
 There's a special treat waiting for you this Halloween.
Remember how, in the Peanuts cartoon, Linus would wait
every Halloween for
the Great Pumpkin to appear in his pumpkin patch? Well, this Halloween there is
a nice big orange pumpkin of sorts right in the middle of the Beehive star
cluster in Cancer.
To receive this treat, all you have to do is stay up past
midnight on Halloween and look for the planet
Mars, now becoming quite bright at magnitude 0.4.
If you haven't looked at Mars lately, you'll be surprised
at how bright it's grown. It now equals the bright star Betelgeuse in
brightness, shines significantly brighter than nearby Castor, Pollux, and
Regulus, and is exceeded only by Sirius (the brightest star in the sky),
Capella, Rigel and Procyon.
Mars typically appears orange or ruddy compared to other
planets and the stars. In a small telescope, it becomes a fuzzy orb rather than
just a point of light.
Zeroing in on Mars with binoculars or a telescope will show
that it is embedded in the beautiful open star cluster, number 44 in Messier's
catalog, known as the Beehive. At 590 light-years distance, it is one of the
closest star clusters to the sun. It's also unusual in that it shines brighter
than any of the individual stars in the its constellation, Cancer.
Read the whole article
| 
