The Hercules Family --- The Constellation of Corvus The Crow

Corvus perches on the back of Hydra. When Crater was also seen as a black bird it too perched on the serpent's back, forming the doorposts and threshold to the Mesopotamian Land of The Dead.

Corvus The Crow, our eleventh member of the Hercules Family of Constellations, is a small rectangular constellation that resembles a crow only by the furthest stretch of the imagination --- and the ancient Babylonians, who called this constellation "The Raven" were imaginative. It made a pair with the constellation the Babylonians called Mulugumushen (another crow or raven), today's Crater The Cup, as one of the doorposts of the entryway to the Land of the Dead. Hydra The Multiheaded Serpent was the threshold. The ancient Chinese called Corvus "The Spanker," naming it for the aft sail on a junk (and it more resembles a spanker than any bird). Nonetheless, Corvus stuck in European legend. Medieval monks claimed that the constellation Argo was in reality Noah's Ark, and that two constellations, Corvus and Columba The Dove, were the birds that Noah had sent aloft after the Deluge. 

Corvus is a dim and small constellation with just one notable star, Gienah (Number 29 in the Nautical Almanac). It does have one fascinating deep sky object, the "Antennae Galaxies". The Antennae Galaxies are gravitationally bound and merging, just as our own Milky Way and neighboring Andromeda will someday become a single galaxy. The Antennae are two long corresponding trails of stellar material, one extending from each galaxy, that resemble tracks in the sky or, together, an insect's antennae.

The Antennae Galaxies, 45 million light years away, give us a glimpse of the future of the Milky Way and Andromeda galaxies as they merge.

Dragged into one body by gravity, both spiral members of the Antennae Galaxies have left a long curving footprint across the heavens. What will be formed is an elliptical galaxy, and the friction of dust and gas will give birth to millions of hot blue short-lived stars.

The Hercules Family --- The Constellation of Crater The Cup

Crater The Cup is the tenth Hercules Family constellation on our list. The Greeks considered Crater to be the goblet of the god Apollo, but Crater is a much more ancient asterism that dates back to Mesopotamia. Called Mulugamushen, it represented a raven and was paired with the constellation later called Corvus The Crow. Along with Hydra The Water Snake, the three formed a celestial doorway to the Road of Death. In China, Mulugamushen was called the Red Bird.

Crater is another dim constellation with no stars brighter than the Fourth Magnitude. Of the 33 recognized stars within the bounds of Crater, only three are known to have planets, and the constellation has a dearth of deep sky objects. Crater 2, a dwarf galaxy discovered in 2016, is one of a number of dwarf galaxies in orbit around our own Milky Way.

The Hercules Family --- The Constellation of Corona Australis The Southern Crown

 

 

Our ninth Hercules Family constellation is Corona Australis The Southern Crown. Visible to the south from the ancient Near East this crescent shaped constellation was considered the counterpart to Corona Borealis The Northern Crown, which was visible to the north. 

Corona Australis is a small and dim asterism with no stars greater than the Fourth Magnitude, but because of its distinctive shape it is readily visible on a dark night. 

There is no specific mythology associated with Corona Australis. The ancient Mesopotamians called it "The Barque" (a type of ship), and the Chinese saw it as a turtle. The Greco-Romans saw it more as a victor's wreath --- a stephanos --- than a true crown. Sometimes it was considered the wreath worn by Sagittarius, and was counted as part of The Archer. It became a crown proper in more modern times. 

There are surprisingly few deep sky objects associated with Corona Australis. The most impressive is a triple nebula, The Coronet Cluster, in which the gases glow brightly backlit by nearby stars.

The Hercules Family --- The Constellation of Scutum The Shield

 

The eighth constellation on our Hercules Family list is Scutum The Shield, a small and dim modern constellation devised like Sextans The Sextant by Johannes Hevelius. 

A scutum is an ancient rectangular shield used by Roman soldiery. Hevelius created this constellation in 1684. He named it after his royal patron, the King of Poland and Grand Duke of Lithuania Jan III Sobieski, calling it Scutum Sobiescianum, "Sobieski's Shield" in honor of the Catholic Grand Duke-King's victory over the Muslims at the Battle of Vienna in 1683. The asterism lacks any suggestion of a cross, though contemporary artwork displays one. 

Interestingly, the Chinese called this asterism "The Helm" but there's no evidence that Hevelius knew of this connection with armor. Modern astronomers have dropped Sobieski's name from the constellation, and the Grand Duke-King is mostly remembered today for being an ancestor of the actress Leelee Sobieski. 

None of Scutum's stars exceeds Magnitude Four, but one, Delta Scuti, is following an orbital path through the Milky Way that will bring it to within 10 light years of Earth in about one million years. By that time, this blue-white giant will exceed Sirius in brightness. 

The most notable deep sky object in Scutum is the Wild Duck Cluster, a star grouping that looks like a flock of birds in the air.

The Hercules Family --- The Constellation of Sextans The Sextant

Sextans has a rather indeterminate asterism, and no bright stars. It stands out mostly because its area of the sky is surprisingly empty.

Seventh on our list of Hercules Family constellations is Sextans The Sextant, a dim modern constellation lying just to the south of Leo The Lion. Sextans has just one star brighter than the fifth magnitude, making it just barely visible to the naked eye in a very dark sky. 

Sextans was first described by Johannes Hevelius (1611-1687). Hevelius was a member of the minor Polish-Lithuanian nobility of the time, and was a senior member of the city council of Danzig (Gdansk), today in Poland. He was a master brewer as well, but his true passion was astronomy. He built an observatory atop his large home, from which he identified seven still-extant constellations, studied sunspots, identified four comets, documented the first observed nova later named CK Vulpeculae, mapped numerous features on the lunar surface, and was inducted into the Royal Society (British), listed as their first German member (Danzig being predominantly a German town, and Hevelius being a native speaker of German) but later recognized as their first Polish member as well. 

Hevelius and his wife Elisabeth (also an astronomer of note) using a quadrant to take observations.

Despite prodding from his friend Edmund Halley, Hevelius was the last astronomer of note not to use a telescope on a regular basis, though he had several impressive ones in his collection. In 1679, his home / observatory burned to the ground, destroying his library and instruments. Enjoying the patronage of the Polish-Lithuanian royalty, he quickly rebuilt and recovered many of his lost records, but the destruction saddened him. He named Sextans, discovered later that year, in memory of his lost astronomical tools.

Today, Sextans is notable as the home of the farthest distant, hence oldest, observable galaxy cluster, CL J1001+0220. In it, we can see young stars forming the first heavy elements (remember that observing deep sky objects means looking back in time). The cluster lies 11.1 billion light years from Earth --- and 11.1 billion years in the past.

The oldest known galaxy cluster with protostars forming, less than 4 billion years after the Big Bang.

The Hercules Family --- The Constellation of the Southern Triangle

 

There is no particular order to the constellations in a given family other than the Zodiac; having said that, let us move along to the next (our sixth) member of the Hercules Family, Triangulum Australe The Southern Triangle. 

Triangulum Australe is a "modern" constellation, first described by the navigator Amerigo Vespucci, after whom America is named. Vespucci was working for the powerful and wealthy de Medici family of Florence, who published his collected astronomical and geographical data in a book titled "Mundus Novus", released in 1504. 

To aid explorers during the Age of Discovery, Vespucci invented a number of constellations in the sky of the Southern Hemisphere, as well as giving names to lands previously unknown to Europeans. To his credit, America was named for him and not by him. All of the constellations he named are small and dim and most of their asterisms just barely suggest the figures he imagined. Triangulum Australe is an exception, largely because triangular arrangements of stars are the easiest asterisms to find. Triangulum Australe is one of the three constellations of the subfamily called "The Draughtsman's Tools." 

The brightest star in Triangulum Australe is Atria, number 43 in the Nautical Almanac. There are many "background" stars in the Southern Triangle since it is superimposed on the Milky Way, but since it overlays our own galaxy it has few deep sky objects. ESO 69-6 is a dramatic pair of merging galaxies to which gravitational interaction has added long tails.

 

The Hercules Family --- The Constellation of Ara The Altar

 

  

The Water Lily or Lotus Nebula

Fifth on our list of Hercules Family constellations is Ara The Altar. It is an ancient constellation dating back to the Mesopotamians who believed it represented their version of the Tower of Babel. 

The ancient Hebrews believed Ara was an altar --- first the altar of Noah, then the altar upon which Abraham offered up Isaac, and then again much later, the altar of the Tabernacle. In the Occident, the only named star in Ara is called Karnot Mizbeach, Hebrew for "the horns of the altar." In the Orient, the only named star (actually a different pair of stars) is Tseen Yin, "The Dark Sky." Other names have been applied in more modern times. 

The Greeks borrowed the Hebrew conception of the constellation but made it the altar upon which their gods swore allegiance to each other in the plot to kill their cannibalistic father, Cronos (Time). 

NGC 6352, a loose globular cluster, lies 20,000 light years from Earth.

The Ara Cluster, 16,000 light years from Earth. The central stars are bright, hot and very young (not more than a million or two million years). The greenish objects are glowing gas clouds.

The Romans turned Ara into a freestanding censer, and most modern art of Ara depicts it as an incense burner. 

NGC 6300, a barred spiral galaxy some 51 million light years from Earth. NGC 6300 has a supermassive black hole at its center, some 300,000 times the mass of our Sun, which is emitting high intensity X-rays.

Ara is in the sky of the Southern Hemisphere, and visible between 25 degrees south and 43 degrees north. Ara is a dim and smallish constellation with no stars above the Third Magnitude. But since it overlays the path of the Milky Way it is rich in deep sky objects. Ara is home to numerous globular clusters, a number of galaxies, and several distinctive nebulae. Seven of its stars have known planets.