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.