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Loading contentOrion's two beacons — a cool red supergiant and a hot blue supergiant.
The red supergiant on Orion's shoulder.
The blue supergiant at Orion's foot.
Connections both Betelgeuse and Rigel share in the knowledge graph.
The eighty-eight official constellations, each mapped by the real positions of its brightest stars. A gateway from the familiar patterns of the night sky into the stars, myths, and deep-sky objects each region holds.
The familiar stick-figure lines that join a constellation's stars, drawn between the real stellar positions to make the ancient patterns legible on the star map.
Late in a low- or intermediate-mass star's life, both a hydrogen shell and a helium shell burn around a carbon–oxygen core. Recurring thermal pulses dredge freshly-made elements to the surface and drive heavy mass loss, as the star climbs the asymptotic giant branch toward the ejection of its envelope.
Gemini is a zodiacal constellation of the northern sky, one of the 88 modern constellations.
Taurus is a large zodiacal constellation of the northern sky, one of the 88 modern constellations.
Red giant in Orion, about 945 light-years from Earth.
Facts on this topic will be cited from these primary and reference sources.
Mission data, planetary science, space telescopes, and public-domain imagery.
Most NASA-produced imagery is in the public domain; individual items are checked for usage terms before publication.
European missions, observatories, and space science imagery.
Official naming, definitions, constellation boundaries, and astronomical nomenclature.