Scheduled air date: 2000 Mar 06-12
The two stars at the "open" end of the Big Dipper (an asterism in Ursa Major)
act as pointer stars to Capella. Capella is the brightest star which appears so
close to the North Celestial Pole — approximately marked by Polaris, the "North
Star" — that it is above the horizon almost all the time for mid-Northern
latitudes.
Capella is actually a four-star system, consisting of two yellow giants and two red
dwarfs. The topmost yellow circles shown here represent the size and separation of
the yellow giants to scale. The small red dots in the bottom portion of this
illustration represent the red dwarfs to scale, relative to the the lower set of yellow
circles representing the same yellow giants (in this case, the sizes are at a larger scale
than the separations).
If you wish to view illustrations for other episodes, please see our Star Gazer Illustrate directory.
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Illustrations on this page were created using
TheSky Astronomy
Software, an advanced desktop planetarium program designed for Windows. Copyright © 1999-2006 by Software Bisque, Inc. |