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The Milky Way [c] is the galaxy that includes the Solar System, with the name describing the galaxy's appearance from Earth: a hazy band of light seen in the night sky formed from stars that cannot be individually distinguished by the naked eye.
It contains Ursa Major and the Hyades star cluster, among others. The Local Bubble also contains the neighboring G-Cloud, which contains the stars Alpha Centauri and Altair. In the galactic context, the Local Bubble is a small part of the Orion Arm, which contains most stars that we can see without a telescope.
The Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC) is a dwarf galaxy and satellite galaxy of the Milky Way. At a distance of around 50 kiloparsecs (163,000 light-years), the LMC is the second- or third-closest galaxy to the Milky Way, after the Sagittarius Dwarf Spheroidal (c. 16 kiloparsecs (52,000 light-years) away) and the possible dwarf irregular galaxy called the Canis Major Overdensity.
In astronomy, the Great Rift (sometimes called the Dark Rift or less commonly the Dark River) is a dark band caused by interstellar clouds of cosmic dust that significantly obscure ( extinguish) the center and most radial sectors of the Milky Way galaxy from Earth 's perspective. In dark, clear night skies, the rift appears as clear as the ...
Due to its location on the Milky Way, this constellation contains many deep-sky objects such as star clusters, including eight open clusters visible through binoculars. NGC 6087 is the brightest of the open clusters in Norma with a magnitude of 5.4. It lies in the southeastern corner of the constellation between Alpha Centauri and Zeta Arae ...
Cygnus (constellation) Visible at latitudes between + 90 ° and − 40 °. Best visible at 21:00 (9 p.m.) during the month of September. Cygnus is a northern constellation on the plane of the Milky Way, deriving its name from the Latinized Greek word for swan. [1] Cygnus is one of the most recognizable constellations of the northern summer and ...
W51 (3C400) is one of the largest stellar nurseries in the Milky Way. Located about 17,000 light-years from Earth, W51 is about 350 light-years – or about 2 quadrillion miles – across. However, it's located in an area so thick with interstellar dust that it's opaque to visible light.
Many star names are, in origin, descriptive of the part in the constellation they are found in; thus Phecda, a corruption of Arabic فخذ الدب ( fakhdh ad-dubb, 'thigh of the bear'). Only a handful of the brightest stars have individual proper names not depending on their asterism; so Sirius ('the scorcher'), Antares ('rival of Ares ', i.e ...