![]() On a planetary level, Venus will be at its greatest eastern elongation Oct. So, while most people refer to meteors as “shooting stars,” Mira is a true shooting star, the only known star with a tail. And, like the bow wave in front of a moving boat, a glowing shock wave of gas spreads out in front of Mira - the shock wave and tail only emit ultraviolet light, so they weren’t discovered until NASA’s Galaxy Evolution Explorer satellite, which can see in the ultraviolet, documented them in 2006. Mira is very fast, traveling at 291,000 miles per hour (10 times faster than our sun), and as it booms through the Milky Way, it sheds huge amounts of its mass, which streams out behind the star to form a 13-light year-long tail. Perseus and Andromeda were married, had seven sons and one daughter, and lived happily ever after.īut neither Fabricius nor Hevelius saw what might be the most wonderful thing about this wonderful star. So, Cepheus chained his daughter to a rock beside the sea so she could be devoured by Cetus.įortunately for Andromeda, Perseus, who had recently killed Medusa by chopping off her head, happened to be flying over Ethiopia with his winged shoes (not on the winged horse Pegasus, as the movies would have us believe), and swooped down to save the day by killing Cetus. When Ethiopia’s King Cepheus asked Zeus for advice, the king of the gods said the only solution was to offer Andromeda as a sacrifice. In Greek mythology, the sea god Poseidon sent Cetus to ravage Ethiopia because Cassiopeia, queen of Ethiopia, had bragged that her daughter Andromeda was more beautiful than the sea nymphs known as the Nereids. Thus, Algol has yet another name: “the winking eye of Medusa.”Īs long as we’re in Halloween/astronomy mode: To the south of Perseus is the constellation Cetus the sea monster. ![]() Then there’s the fact that Algol is in the part of Perseus that represents the head of Medusa, a pretty ghoulish gal in her own right, considering that she had snakes for hair and a face that turned people to stone.
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