Apus is a small constellation in the southern sky. It represents a bird-
of-paradise, and its name (from Greek for "without feet") was chosen
because the bird-of-paradise was once wrongly believed to lack feet.
First depicted on a celestial globe by Petrus Plancius in 1598, it was
charted on a star atlas by Johann Bayer in his 1603 Uranometria
(pictured). The French explorer and astronomer Nicolas-Louis de Lacaille
charted the brighter stars and gave them Bayer designations in 1756. The
five brightest stars are all reddish in hue. Shading the others at
apparent magnitude 3.8 is Alpha Apodis, an orange giant that has around
48 times the diameter and 928 times the luminosity of the Sun.
Marginally fainter is Gamma Apodis, another ageing giant star. Delta
Apodis is a double star, the two components of which are 103 arcseconds
apart and visible with the naked eye. Two star systems have been found
to have planets.
Read more: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apus>
_______________________________
Today's selected anniversaries:
1859:
The French Navy captured the Citadel of Saigon, a fortress that
was manned by 1,000 Nguyễn dynasty soldiers, en route to conquering
Saigon and other regions of southern Vietnam.
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citadel_of_Saigon>
1904:
Italian composer Giacomo Puccini's Madama Butterfly (Geraldine
Farrar in the title role pictured) premiered at La Scala in Milan,
generating negative reviews that forced him to rewrite the opera.
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Madama_Butterfly>
1974:
A U.S. Army soldier stole a Bell UH-1 helicopter and landed it
on the White House South Lawn.
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1974_White_House_helicopter_incident>
2006:
A massive landslide in the Philippine province of Southern
Leyte killed over 1,000 people.
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2006_Southern_Leyte_mudslide>
_____________________________
Wiktionary's word of the day:
hobbyist:
A person who is interested in an activity or a subject as a hobby.
<https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/hobbyist>
___________________________
Wikiquote quote of the day:
Nature is not merely present, but is implanted within things,
distant from none; naught is distant from her except the false, and that
which existed never and nowhere — nullity. And while the outer face of
things changeth so greatly, there flourisheth the origin of being more
intimately within all things than they themselves. The fount of all
kinds, Mind, God, Being, One, Truth, Destiny, Reason, Order.
--Giordano Bruno
<https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Giordano_Bruno>
Show replies by date