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CETUS
The Sea Monster
Cetus - Alexander Jamieson - 1822
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Like a vision of the Loch Ness Monster, Cetus is the sea monster of the epic tale of Andromeda. Sent by Neptune to devour the unfortunate princess, and atone for the sins of her mother, the queen Cassiopeia. Cetus is a large constellation, low on the southern horizon for most northern latitudes, and like most monsters, it lurks in the shadows. None of its stars are particularly bright, and you have to look hard to see it.
The alpha star in Cetus is actually the second brightest, named Menkar, from the Arabic for nose, as it does represent the nose of the beast. It is an M1 red giant, a star in the last stages of its life, 250 light years away with a magnitude of 2.54.
Beta Ceti is in fact the brightest star in the constellation, at a magnitude of 2.04. It has the ancient Arabic name of Diphda, meaning the second frog (the first frog being the bright star Fomalhaut to the southwest). It is also called Deneb Kaitos, the whale's tail, being one of three stars to mark the tail of the beast. It is a K0 yellow-orange giant, 96 light years away.
Gamma Ceti is the star Al Kaff al Jidhmah. Its name is traced back through ancient Arabic lore as meaning part of the hand, referring to the circlet of stars that now mark the whale's head. It is an A3 white main-sequence star, 82 light years away with a magnitude of 3.56.
Baten Kaitos is the belly of the whale. It is 260 light years away with a magnitude of 3.9.
Dheneb marks the beginning of the whale's tail, and Deneb Kaitos Shemali is the northern branch of the whale's tail.
Mira (pronounced my-rah, after the Latin word for "wonderful"), has been closely studied as a variable star (a star whose brightness varies) for over 400 years. Over the course of approximately 331 days, Mira goes from a very dim magnitude 9 (invisible to the naked eye), all the way to a brilliant magnitude 2 (making it one of the brightest stars in the sky), and back again. And in August, 2007, when NASA turned one of its ultraviolet telescopes in the star's direction, they discovered something previously unknown. The star has a tail, similar to a comet, except of course very much larger and longer. Mira's tail extends 13 light years across space, a distance many thousands of times greater than our entire solar system.
Mira is an unusual star in more ways than one. Instead of following the rest of the stars in our galaxy in a long, slow circle around the galaxy's centre, Mira is speeding along at right angles to the disk of the galaxy at a breakneck speed of 291,000 miles per hour. Below is NASA's ultraviolet image of Mira (moving left to right) and its spectacular tail.
To date there have been twelve planetary systems discovered in the constellation Cetus. The stars are all too faint to see, and the planets are all gas giants.
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