Abstract
Clear winter nights are bitter cold. And yet, they are incredibly beautiful. Winter nights display many fascinating objects for observers. So bundle up and grab your binoculars!
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- 1.
Charles Messier was an eighteenth century French comet hunter, who published a catalog of deep-sky objects that were not comets. This list is often called the 110 Messier Objects.
- 2.
Red giants are older stars that have exhausted their hydrogen supply, resulting in a contracting core that heats up the outer layers that expand. Our Sun, too, will end as a red giant. The presence of red giants in a cluster is a measure for the age of a cluster.
- 3.
White dwarfs are the final evolutionary stage of stars that became red giants. They have ejected their outer shells in a planetary nebula. What remains is a very dense core of inert matter. A white dwarf with the mass of our Sun would be the size of Earth.
- 4.
M38 appears large because it has bright members spread out over its entire area. Under dark skies, M37 will appear larger.
- 5.
Per Collinder was a twentieth century Swedish astronomer who published a catalogue of open clusters.
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© 2012 Springer Science+Business Media, LLC
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De Laet, R. (2012). January. In: The Casual Sky Observer's Guide. Astronomer's Pocket Field Guide. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-0595-5_3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-0595-5_3
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