Megraz viewed in Stellarium

[Tinker1947]

Get the FOV down to 0.200'ish, anybody want to make a guess why the ring of stars are like they are, i doubt there anything to do with Megraz as its a lot close to Earth then the they are.....?????

[Sp@ce_d]

Doesn't look real... is that right?

[Tinker1947]

That's how Stellarium shows it, i will try to get a image when its not cloudy.....

[Sp@ce_d]

It's a sign!.. They look like they're in a perfect circle.. well almost. Be interesting to image.. house gets in the way for me this time of year.. Megrez will be quite bright in comparison.

[badgers]

Are we talking about the strange object south of Megrez ?

I think it's just an artefact caused by the fact that Stellarium is showing a really small texture overlaid onto the optical double star M40 (Winneke 4).

The texture looks odd because it's small and showing more stars than the background around it.

This got me interested in M40 though, according to wikipedia it's one of the few things in his catalogue he got wrong... he messiered up big time : )

[badgers]

Are we talking about the strange object south of Megrez ?

*edit... North of Megrez

[Sp@ce_d]

The circle of stars around Megrez...

[badgers]

Ok.... that's not showing up for me at all on my version (0.11.1 Macintosh) with high zoom or an ocular FOV of 0.2 or even less.

Weird.

[Tinker1947]

I think its a graphic bug, it shows on 2 of my PC's but the freshly installed PC outside it doesn't......anyways here is a 60 second image which doesn't show the circle of stars....

[Sp@ce_d]

Interesting... it certainly looks false in Stellarium. You got all the catalogues loaded on the ones that don't show it?

[Tinker1947]

Interesting... it certainly looks false in Stellarium. You got all the catalogues loaded on the ones that don't show it?

It downloaded them this evening....also has the beta update....

[badgers]

The Stellarium devs obviously are the first to spot the invasion force of Greys approaching from that direction.

[Star Gazer]

I get this in Stellarium 0.10.6 on my MacBook Pro. Don't see anything like it in SkySafari Pro on the same machine.

[squeaky]

Oohhh! Me me me me <waves hand in air>...

Gravitational lensing?

A very large galaxy or supermassive black hole that just happened to be passing behind Megrez when they mapped that region?

[Hypernova]

OT but the screenshot from Stellarium looks quite like a gravitational lens, kind of like what you see from Hubble's amazing photos of massive galaxy clusters. I think if Megrez was massive enough to cause that effect I'd be a little concerned

[Naemeth]

I'm seeing it too, I last downloaded the latest stable version of Stellarium. It looks similar to a rough map of our Solar System, if you take the circle of stars as the Kuiper Belt. (Not exactly of course)