\n
Star map<\/p>\n
Time to track down a faint gem of the northern skies. Nestled between the bright constellations of Cygnus, the swan, and the mythical mother-daughter pair of Cassiopeia and Andromeda, Lacerta, the lizard, is admittedly a faint constellation.<\/p>\n
However, picking out its distinctive shape on a cold, dark night brings a tremendous sense of accomplishment at knowing the night sky.<\/p>\n
Lacerta was named in the 17th century by the Polish-German astronomer Johannes Hevelius. In constructing his star chart, he endeavoured to fill in any large gaps between the bright constellations that had been known since antiquity.<\/p>\n
The chart shows the view looking high into the southern sky from London at 19:30 GMT on 27 October, although the view will remain essentially the same all week. Even though Lacerta contains no really bright stars, it does trace a distinctive zigzag shape that is reminiscent of a lizard crawling across the sky.<\/p>\n
To see the constellation will require a dark sky, well away from street lights, but as an added bonus, such a sky will show Cygnus and the autumn Milky Way extremely well. Being a northern constellation, Lacerta does not rise high in the southern sky. Hugging the northern horizon, it is a real challenge to see.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Star map Time to track down a faint gem of the northern skies. Nestled between the bright constellations of Cygnus, the swan, and the mythical mother-daughter pair of Cassiopeia and Andromeda, Lacerta, the lizard, is admittedly a faint constellation. However, picking out its distinctive shape on a cold, dark night brings a tremendous sense of<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":30809,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[58],"tags":[18028,18027,2141,446,516,67,2877,1613],"class_list":{"0":"post-30808","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-science","8":"tag-crawling","9":"tag-lacerta","10":"tag-lizard","11":"tag-night","12":"tag-science","13":"tag-sky","14":"tag-spot","15":"tag-starwatch"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30808","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=30808"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30808\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/30809"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=30808"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=30808"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=30808"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}