Re: What are the two stars to the right of Orion?
Posted: Sun Feb 10, 2013 5:19 pm
Isn't it most likely that all the stars were added for artistic reasons, and that except for Orion, which is well known, anything else is simply arbitrarily placed?Brad Schaefer wrote:The APOD shows two bright stars to the right of Orion and above the Procession. What are those two stars? They don't appear in any of the other versions of the the Hahn painting. Judging from their relative positions to Orion, they are roughly at declination of 3° to 6°. (Note also that the reddish colored Betelgeuse is substantially set lower in declination, by perhaps 3°, than it really appears.) The stars (other than Betelgeuse) are depicted with comparable white size dots, with the Orion stars being from magnitude 0.3 to 2.2; so presumably the two stars on the right are somewhere in that range. I have checked Voyager (a good planetarium program) for that date and time and location, and there are no bright stars or planets in that region to the right of Orion. So what are those stars? One possibility is that they represent Aldebaran (magnitude 1.0, declination 16°) and Saturn (magnitude 0.1, declination 17°). But this possibility is poor because those candidates are far to the north of the represented position and the Aldebaran-candidate is not painted reddish (like Betelgeuse). Another possibility is that the two stars were added for some artistic reason. And why only in this version of the painting?