Blue and yellow (complementary colors) make the Ukrainian flag. Blue and yellow are also the colors of one of the most famous of double stars.
Part of our photo from the London demonstration. And with colors reversed!
The star is Albireo (or Beta Cygni), marking the head of the Swan constellation Cygnus that flies along the Milky Way. Albireo is now highest above the pre-dawn horizon. Rather chilly March weather for going out and looking through your telescope to see whether you can “split” the double star. And bitterly cold snowy March weather for those fighting in Ukraine.
White and red are the colors of the Belarusian flag (also visible in the photo above), and we could find a stellar symbolism in this too. Sirius is also a double star, though, unlike Albireo, a very unequal one: the white primary is the brightest of all stars, the companion is a faint red dwarf, nicknamed the Pup since Sirius is the Dog Star. And Belarus is behaving like Russia’s puppy: aiding the invasion, voting against United Nations condemnation.
Russian airstrikes and artillery strikes on Ukrainian hospitals, schools, and homes, and on a nuclear reactor, are unforgiveable. The Russian president regards it as intolerable that Ukraine should have any chance of becoming part of a Western military alliance. Negotiations still flicker on. The war should just stop, and it still seems to me that the only way it can stop is for each side to recognize the other’s “red line.” No more bombardment, no more militarization.
I meant to make you colored diagrams of Albireo and Sirius, but the afternoon is flying away, I may do it for tomorrow. Here is a way, a delightfully paradoxical one, of helping some of those whose homes have been shattered by the violence. Tilly writes:
“Some of you may have already heard about this ingenuous way of helping individual Ukrainians by ‘renting’ an Airbnb in Kyiv or other areas of the country.
“Anyone with an Airbnb account can book accommodation. We chose an apartment in Kyiv for £24 ($32), but there were rooms for as little as £14 ($18.50). I sent our host, Yuriy, a message using Google Translate. We quickly received his reply, which translated to: “Dear friends, thank you for your help! With this money we will be able to help families left homeless. Thank you!!”
“Airbnb says it’s waiving its charges for this initiative.”
__________
ILLUSTRATIONS in these posts are made with precision but have to be inserted in another format. You may be able to enlarge them on your monitor. One way: right-click, and choose “View image”, then enlarge. Or choose “Copy image”, then put it on your desktop, then open it. On an iPad or phone, use the finger gesture that enlarges (spreading with two fingers, or tapping and dragging with three fingers). Other methods have been suggested, such as dragging the image to the desktop and opening it in other ways.
Sometimes I make improvements or corrections to a post after publishing it. If you click on the title, rather than on ‘Read more’, I think you are sure to see the latest version. Or you can click ‘Refresh’ to get the latest version.
This weblog maintains its right to be about astronomy or anything under the sun.
For the confused:
Your reversal is in the world of light colors; the others being Green/Magenta, Red/Cyan – so true of stars.
In pigments, Blue is complementary to Orange, Yellow to Violet, Red to Green.
I remember when I discovered that, just as adding Black pigment shows White in shade, So adding a complementary color shows a color in shade. For instance, to paint/draw a Green object that is less illumined, add Red. Red is then Green’s grey (shade). What astonished me most upon discovering this for myself – was that no one had ever told me that this was the case.
See this page from my “Lyme Maze Game”
http://www.lymaze.com/complement.htm#
Alberio is easy to split and I can do it with an 8×25 monocular.I can’t remember if I’ve tried with my 5×10 Zeiss Mini Quick monocular but I don’t remember 5x being enough to split it.It was though that the components where interrelated, like the Ukraine and Russia,but they think now that they are a line of sight double.