Talk:Celaeno (star)

Confusing Celaeno with Pleione, also Atlas not brightest star

I am not a professional astronomer so I hope I am not making a gaff here, but concerning the sentence..

"This star is located only 5 arcminutes from the brightest member of the Pleiades, the star Atlas. Thus, Celaeno requires clear seeing conditions and good vision to distinguish from its neighbor. "

I believe it is Pleione that this writer was talking about. Here is a quote from the Pleione page.

“Despite a mean apparent magnitude of +5.05, the star is rather difficult to resolve with the naked eye, because its close neighbour Atlas is 3.7 times brighter and located less than 5 arcminutes away.”

Also
- My Stellarium program has Pleione, not Celaeno, 5 arcminutes away from Atlas. (if I’m not mistaken.)
- Atlas is not the brightest star Absolute magnitude wise or Apparent wise. Refer Pleiades#Brightest stars in Pleiades

Also, I don’t know to what extent the close proximity of the other Pleiadian stars play in the poor visibility of Celaeno. If it has an effect maybe it should be mentioned.
Also, I’m assuming the reason that the visible binary pair Asterope (star) is not the seventh sister is because their magnitudes combine. Individually they are dimmer than Celaeno. If this is true it may be useful if someone were to calculate the combined brightness of the pair and show that it is greater than Celaeno’s brightness.
Note the section Pleiades#Brightest stars in Pleiades discusses the seven sisters. For easy reference I placed what was removed below.(it contains a "reference").
I made the best edit I can but of course check the accuracy of my rewrite.
Dave3457 (talk) 19:44, 11 August 2010 (UTC)[reply]

This star is located only 5 arcminutes from the brightest member of the Pleiades, the star Atlas. Thus, Celaeno requires clear seeing conditions and good vision to distinguish from its neighbor. For this reason, star gazers often only see six of the seven Pleiades sisters with their unaided sight.^[1]

Combined Sterope I+II is 5.31, a shade higher than Celaeno at 5.46.

But besides this, the article mentions Celaeno as being the seventh – which it probably isn't. It's the dimmest of the named ones (counting Sterope I+II together, as it will normally be perceived); but there are actually more than seven named ones (the seven sisters and their parents Atlas and Pleione all have stars named after them). The magnitude gap between Taygeta (sixth-brightest) and Pleione (seventh-brightest), at about 0.8, is the highest between any consecutive pair of them, and Pleione also suffers from being so close to Atlas in the sky; so I think Pleione is actually the one people usually expect to see but don't. (This site agrees.) As such I removed that mention.

P.S. As for the identification of Celaeno mythologically as the lost Pleiad: she's not the only candidate (it's variously said to be Celaeno, Electra, or Merope). The website I linked above says "It is difficult to know if the modern naming pays attention to any of this. Celæno is the faintest at present, but the "star" Asterope is actually two stars, each of which is fainter than Celæno if considered separately.". (And is that use of the æ ligature standard?) Double sharp (talk) 12:15, 27 December 2014 (UTC)[reply]

References

^ 2007, Fred. The 50 best sights in astronomy and how to see them: observing eclipses, bright comets, meteor showers, and other celestial wonders. John Wiley and Sons. p. 141. ISBN 0471696579. {{cite book}}: |last= has numeric name (help); Unknown parameter |DUPLICATE_last= ignored (help)

[1] 2007, Fred. The 50 best sights in astronomy and how to see them: observing eclipses, bright comets, meteor showers, and other celestial wonders. John Wiley and Sons. p. 141. ISBN 0471696579. {{cite book}}: |last= has numeric name (help); Unknown parameter |DUPLICATE_last= ignored (help)

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