2.7 KiB
| name | created_by | created_date | updated_by | updated_date |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Scutum | skybber | 2021-07-25 07:42:36.335796 | skybber | 2021-07-25 07:42:36.335967 |
A small constellation just south of the celestial equator, below the border of Eagle and the tail of the Serpent, whose brightest stars only reach 4mag, but it's not hard to find - at least under a slightly dark sky. Indeed, the shield lies in a rich part of the Milky Way, on the northwestern boundary, plus it is interspersed with the dark clouds of the Great Rift and projects a very bright star cloud - a large number of distant stars that the eye cannot distinguish and perceives as just a luminous cloud. Seen from Central Europe, it is the brightest brightening ever seen in the available part of the Milky Way.
The cloud in the Shield shows great contrast to its surroundings. It is in this region that you will notice the striking combination of bright star fields with the extremely dark dust clouds of the Great Rift located in the foreground, creating remarkable bays directly in and around the cloud. Particularly striking is the one-degree Barnard 103 nebula, lying between the α and β Scuti stars. In addition, many dark regions of dust are distributed throughout the constellation and have found their numbers in the Barnard Catalogue of Dark Nebulae. Probably the most striking complex (B103, B104, B110, B111 and B113) extends from the Great Rift into the northern parts of the constellation, and its contrast with the surrounding star field is really striking in the triad. Look for another large dark nebula over one and a half degrees long during good conditions just southeast of γ Sct, in a field crowded with faint stars (B312).
If you look more closely, you'll definitely see that the Cloud in the Shield is irregularly shaped and not just an oval. In the sky from the north it follows the stars λ and 12 AQL, η and β Sct, then heads towards the stars ε and δ Sct, from which it rises back to λ Aql. The open cluster M11 (5.8mag) is visible directly in the cloud with the naked eye. The cloud itself looks like a lively mixture of nebulae under a dark sky, with a few just distinguishable stellar sparks glittering in it. This is a large number of distant stars that the eye cannot distinguish individually and therefore perceives only as a luminous cloud. In fact, it is a kind of window between opaque clouds of interstellar matter through which we can see a relatively large distance towards the centre of the Galaxy. For in this direction we are looking not perpendicularly, but directly along one spiral arm - the Sagittarius arm. This is the innermost of the main arms, and is wide and extensive, encircling almost the whole Galaxy before it begins to disappear.