Скачать или смотреть The Shape of Ursa Major in Three Dimensions

This visualization reveals the stars of the Ursa Major constellation in three dimensions. Watch as the familiar pattern on the sky distorts into a whole new perspective.

At the start of the sequence, the camera pans upward to the asterism known as the "Big Dipper". Five of these seven stars - Mizar, Alioth, Megrez, Phecda and Merak - have similar speed and motion across the sky, and belong to the Ursa Major Moving Group. The camera then zooms out to reveal the rest of the "Great Bear". Ursa Major is the third largest constellation on the night sky, behind Hydra and Virgo.

Mizar and Alcor (the star to its upper left) form a naked eye double as seen from Earth. However, shortly after the camera starts its journey around Ursa Major, Mizar splits into three distinct visible stars. Two of these stars form a telescopic double, and the other is spectroscopic double. Alcor itself is also a double star system, for a total of 6 stars. Mizar and Alcor can be called an astronomical "triple double".

As the camera continues around the constellation, it shows the "Big Dipper" stars are relatively close to the Sun, within approximately 125 ly. The farthest star in the Ursa Major constellation, Alula Borealis, is some 400 ly away. The Pleiades and Hyades star clusters in Taurus can be seen near the Sun early on during the spin, with some members of the Orion constellation below it. The Hyades cluster remains visible for most of the spin, getting particularly close to the camera toward the end of the sequence.

This visualization features over 11 million stars down to a magnitude of 13.5 across the sky. The positions, colors, and luminosities are based on the Gaia and Hipparcos star catalogs, complemented by the HYG Database, which includes data from the Yale and Gliese catalogs. Interstellar dust is visualized using the Edenhofer map out to a distance of 1.25 kiloparsecs (~4,000 ly) from the Sun. The rest of the Milky Way plane is recreated using simulated spiral galaxy data for stars and dust from the Horizon GalMer database.

Credits:
Visualization: Christian Nieves, Frank Summers (STScI)
Motion Graphics: Ralf Crawford (STScI)
Music: Christian Nieves (STScI)

Data:
Gaia DR3 – ESA/Gaia/DPAC
Hipparcos Catalog – ESA
HYG-Database (v4.1) – Astronexus CC BY-SA 4.0
Edenhofer et al (2023). A Parsec-Scale Galactic 3D Dust Map out to 1.25 kpc from the Sun -- Dataset for the 1.25 kpc 3D Dust Map and the 2 kpc 3D Dust Map (v1.0.2) [Data set]. Zenodo.
Horizon GalMer Database – Chilingarian I. V., Di Matteo P., Combes F., Melchior A.-L., Semelin B., 2010, A&A, 518, A61

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