Boat

“Rho Rho Your Boat”

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Let’s begin our tour of the Rho Ophiuchi Cloud Complex with Antares (a.ka. “the heart of the scorpion”).   You can see Antares, labeled “Alpha Sco” (with the Greek letter alpha)/Antares, in the lower right of the image. It’s a yellow-orange star surrounded by nebulosity. Antares, the brightest star in the constellation of Scorpius, is a red supergiant star, such stars are geriatrics, nearing the end of their lives. The star has depleted the fuel supply of hydrogen within its core and has now bloated outwards to monstrous proportions. If you could replace our own Sun with Antares, its tenuous outer layers would stretch all the way out to the orbit of Mars. As it goes through its death throes, the star has expelled a lot of its mass as shells of gas and dust into space. Dying stars such as Antares increase their luminosity as they swell outwards and become a yellowish, orange-red color. The nebulosity surrounding Antares is created by those sluffed off layers of gas and dust and it is the fine-grained dust that we see reflecting the dying star’s yellowish light. -UA Little Rock

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Tell me what you think in the comments!

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Exif. Nikon

24-120mm f/4

(Sky Tracked 10 Shots)