Stargazing

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Updated:Tuesday Oct 7 2008,14:00 EDT- Ottawa Airport

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This Week in the Sky

Buzzing around the Horse

A distinctive baseball diamond pattern, marked out by four bright stars makes Pegasus - the flying horse -an easy constellation to find, high above the southern horizon.

Look out toward the far right of the diamond form, Pegasus' brightest star, orange-coloured Enif marks the stallion's nose. Scan with binoculars above and to the right of Enif and you can glimpse M15, a giant globular cluster more than 33,000 light years from Earth. Known as the 'fly', it is a faint, fuzzy ball of 500,000 stars held together by gravity. Emitting large amounts of x-rays, astronomers believe there is a black hole at its centre.

An even more exotic destination within Pegasus - a faint naked-eye star lying halfway between second and third base stars - Markab and Scheat. Lying 55 light-years away, 51 Pegasi is the first sun-like star known to have a planet. While the exoplanet itself is not visible, it's amazing to think that this scorched world is half-the size of Jupiter and orbits so close to its parent sun that its year lasts only 4 days.

- Andrew Fazekas