Is Hydrae( constellation) the largest constellation in the night sky?
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this is kind of a trick question as it depends on who you ask and what you mean by largest\n\ngenerally hydra is considered the largest, as it is the longest and streches the length of 172 full moons placed side by side.\n\nbut it is in the southern hemisphere so many people in the northern hemisphere (mostly americans) don't know about it and say that orion is the largest.\n\nand orion is the largest constelllation in the northern hemisphere.\n\nnow if by largest you mean distance and not just area of the sky well then that is different again.\n\nbut just go with hyda, that is what I do.
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Did you mean Cassiopeia?\n\nIt's a constellation of stars that looks like a big 'W' located almost directly opposite the Big Dipper across the north celestial pole. Five bright stars in the constellation form a rough W (or M ) in the sky.\n\nThe name comes from a woman of Greek legend.\n\nSee the link for all the details.
1015703
the most massive known star may be eta carinae.  it is estimated to be between 100 and 150 solar masses.  it also seems to be shedding mass at a terrific rate.  this has to be the best answer so far.\n\nread this page:\nhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eta_Carinae
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You can see many of them with the naked eye, and some of the get pretty darn bright.  You can even see the inetrantional space station when it passes overhead.  Of course any of these objects will jusst look like a star moving across the sky at a decent rate.  But it is pretty cool.\n\nhttp://www.heavens-above.com will tell you exactly what is visible from your location on any night, as well as where to look.  You'll need a little bit of amature astronomy knowledge (magnitudes, reading a starchart) to get much out of it, but it is an awsome resource for this kind of thing.
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Mars and Saturn, Venus in the evening, and you're in for a real treat clouds permitting. Mercury was at it's greatest Western Elongation only last Sunday a whole 28 degrees West, so very visible in the morning, magnitude 0.41\nDon't forget the Lyrids meteor shower on the 22nd will you.
845717
An international team of astronomers from France, Italy, the UK and Australia has found a previously unknown galaxy colliding with our own Milky Way. This newly-discovered galaxy takes the record for the nearest galaxy to the centre of the Milky Way. Called the Canis Major dwarf galaxy after the constellation in which it lies, it is about 25000 light years away from thesolar system and 42000 light years from the centre of the Milky Way. This i closer than the Sagittarius dwarf galaxy, discovered in 1994, which is also colliding with the Milky Way. The discovery shows that the Milky Way is building up its own disk by absorbing small satellite galaxies. The research is to be published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society within the next few weeks.\n\nThe discovery of the Canis Major dwarf was made possible by a recent survey of the sky in infrared light (the Two-Micron All Sky Survey or "2MASS"), which has allowed astronomers to look beyond the clouds of dust in the disk of the Milky Way. Until now, the dwarf galaxy lay undetected behind the dense disk. "It's like putting on infrared night-vision goggles," says team-member Dr Rodrigo Ibata of Strasbourg Observatory. "We are now able to study a part of the Milky Way that has been previously out of sight".\n\nThe new dwarf galaxy was detected by its M-giant stars =AD cool, red stars that shine especially brightly in infrared light. "We have used these rare M-giant stars as beacons to trace out the shape and location of the new galaxy because its numerous other stars are too faint for us to see," explains Nicolas Martin, also of Strasbourg Observatory. "They are particularly useful stars as we can measure their distances, and so map out the three-dimensional structure of distant regions of the Milky Way disk." In this way, the astronomers found the main dismembered corpse of the dwarf galaxy in Canis Major and long trails of stars leading back to it. It seems that streams of stars pulled out of the cannibalised Canis Major galaxy not only contribute to the outer reaches of the Milky Way's disk, but may also pass close to the Sun.\n\nAstronomers currently believe that large galaxies like the Milky Way grew to their present majestic proportions by consuming their smaller galactic neighbours. They have found that cannibalised galaxies add stars to the vast haloes around large galaxies. However, until now, they did not appreciate that even the disks of galaxies can grow in this fashion. Computer simulations show that the Milky Way has been taking stars from the Canis Major dwarf and adding them to its own disk - and will continue to do so.\n\n"On galactic scales, the Canis Major dwarf galaxy is a lightweight of about only one billion Suns," said Dr. Michele Bellazzini of Bologna Observatory. "This small galaxy is unlikely to hold together much longer. It is being pushed and pulled by the colossal gravity of our Milky Way, which has been progressively stealing its stars and pulling it apart." Some remnants of the Canis Major dwarf form a ring around the disk of the Milky Way.\n\n"The Canis Major dwarf galaxy may have added up to 1% more mass to our Galaxy," said Dr Geraint Lewis of the University of Sydney. "This is also an important discovery because it highlights that the Milky Way is not in its middle age - it is still forming." "Past interactions of the sort we are seeing here could be responsible for some of the exquisite detail we see today in the structure of the Galaxy," says Dr Michael Irwin of the University of Cambridge.
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Most ancient cultures saw pictures in the stars of the night sky. The earliest known efforts to catalogue the stars date to cuneiform texts and artifacts dating back roughly 6000 years. These remnants, found in the valley of the Euphrates River, suggest that the ancients observing the heavens saw the lion, the bull, and the scorpion in the stars. The constellations as we know them today are undoubtedly very different from those first few--our night sky is a compendium of images from a number of different societies, both ancient and modern. By far, though, we owe the greatest debt to the mythology of the ancient Greeks and Romans.\n\nThis website should help you a lot.  It talks seperately about 27 of the major constellations of Greek Mythology.\n\nAs far as which stars they saw?  When they lloked up at the skies without telescopes, they saw the same stars (with the exception of newly formed stars) as we see.  What we have been able to identify and name with our higher technology is such a vast list I wouldn't know where to begin.
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No, they are not.  Take, for example, Orion's constellation.  In the sword part of his constellation lies a galaxy that is shaped much like the Milky Way, and can be seen even through a low powered telescope as a cluster and not a single star.  With the naked eye, however, it looks like a single star.
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http://www.windows.ucar.edu/tour/link=/the_universe/Constellations/north_constellations.html\nhttp://members.aol.com/ckckside/reports/constellation/astrod.htm\nhttp://domeofthesky.com/clicks/constlist.html\n\nThe above sites show details. Quite informative.
633987
There are a lot of red stars in space. From Nasa's web site: "There are many normal red stars near the Sun, with temperatures of a few thousand degrees and masses much less than that of the Sun. None, however, is bright enough to be seen without a telescope. All of the bright red stars in the night sky are red giants and supergiants, counted among those we term abnormal stars. Examples are the supergiants Betelgeuse in Orion and Antares in Scorpius (each about 520 light years from Earth) and giant Aldebaran (68 light years) in Taurus."
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None, they up in the Sky, best seen at night. The Earth does revolve around a Big Star that can actually be seen in the day and not night. Make for a good Word Play/Riddle question. ;-D
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Yes, yes and yes, the people who answered your question were quite familiar with the night sky being a portal into the distant past.\nI've been fascinated with the night sky and have studied books and articles on astronomy and astro-physics over the years just so I can try to keep up with current issues.  In several bedrooms where I have lived, I have painted the night sky in deep, swirling cerulean blues and blacks with the comets(wasn't that neat we finally got to see some comets in the 1990's?) and galaxies, and shooting stars and suns and nebulae.  The best, of course, is the images that have come in through the Hubble Telescope, such majesty and wonder, beyond my simple mind to grasp!  Such distances, such an endless melange of mysteries and ideas to confront and wrap our minds around.  You must love the sky as well, to ask such as you have.  You must also be a teacher at heart.  Thanks for your question.\n                                                          --->>>Sincerely, UCSteve
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Yes, it is. It is the third closest star to The Sun (Sol) after Proxima Cenaturi and Barnard's Star. "A very cool, main sequence red dwarf (M5.8Ve), Wolf 359 is our Sun's dimmest stellar neighbor within 10 ly, with less than 2/100,000th of Sol's luminosity." It is 7.8 light years aways and is in the constellation Leo.
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Alpha Centauri is the brightest star in the constellation Centaurus and 3d-brightest star in the sky; also known as Rigil Kent or Rigil Kentaurus; 1992 position R.A. 14h39.1m, Dec. −60°49′. It is a yellow main-sequence star of the same spectral class (G2 V) as the sun and of about the same size and mass; its apparent magnitude is −0.26. Actually, Alpha Centauri is a triple-star system, the components being designated A, B, and C. Alpha Centauri C is also called Proxima Centauri because it is the closest star to the earth (other than the sun), at a distance of 4.28 light-years, components A and B are currently 4.34 light-years away. Proxima Centauri orbits about the common center of mass of the system with a period of more than 250,000 years, so that in about 125,000 years it will be more distant than A and B.\nThis is not counting the sun, friend.
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The Pleiades are a dipper-shaped cluster of stars situated in the “shoulder” of the constellation Taurus. While roughly 400 light years from Earth, the Pleiades are one of the most visible clusters in the night sky. On a given night, between six and seven of the nearly 500 stars in the clusters are visible with the naked eye. The Pleiades have been the subject of a plethora of myths and tales from a variety of cultures; they are best known, however, as the seven sisters from Greek mythology. The nine most prominent stars have individual Greek names and represent each of the seven sisters of Greek mythology and their parents. The brightest member in the Pleiades is Alcyon. The other stars in the cluster that have Greek names include Merope, Celaeno, Sterope (which is actually a double star), Taygeta, Maia, Electra, Atlas, and Pleione.
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Yes you can. Those are all northern constellations and are visible from anywhere north of the equator. The bright lights of the city may be a problem though. These are not the brightest constellations.
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C for Constellations\nWhat else could they be; meteors or satellites? I think not :).