Voyager . . .

Sunday, August 12, 2018

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

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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.

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