Star colours
Taken by PAOLO PALMA on May 20, 2025 @
Naples - Italy
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Details:
Here at a glance are the shades of all the stars within the sixth magnitude of the Ursa Major one of the most popular constellations in the celestial vault.
Beyond magnitude +5, one notices that scattered among the bright blue stars that draw the Big Dipper asterism are many other fainter yellow and orange stars, scattered as far as the neighboring constellations of the Draco and Canes Venatici.
In this mosaic are visible more than 110 stars, that is, all those potentially observable with the naked eye under a dark sky. I photographed them one by one deliberately out of focus as they appear in the eyepiece of an 18-inch dobson at 285 magnifications to better highlight their opaque hues and placed on a scale according to apparent magnitude.
They can represent – in the various chromatic gradations – almost all the best-known spectral classes, as can be seen in the second image.
They are the colors of Callisto, nymph turned into a Bear by Hera for Zeus' betrayal. They seem to be the last trace of the beauty that had seduced Zeus and that Hera had tried to hide under the guise of a bear, yet remained forever etched in these shades, as well as in the greek name of the nymph.
Photographer's website:
https://www.unsaltonelcielo.it
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