The constellation Cassiopeia represents many different things depending on which culture you focus on. The Egyptians associated the constellation with an evil god, to the Chinese it represents a charioteer, and to the Celts it is the home of the king of the faeries. However, the most common representation of Cassiopeia is from Greek mythology where Cassiopeia was the queen of the country Aethiopia on the northern border of Africa. Cassiopeia boasted that she and her daughter Andromeda were more beautiful than the Nereids, the sea nymph attendants of Poseidon (the sea god) and his wife. The nymphs urged Poseidon to punish Cassiopeia for saying this, and he unleashed the sea monster Cetus onto the coast of her kingdom. Cepheus, Cassiopeia’s husband, visited an oracle who said that the only way to save the kingdom was to sacrifice their daughter Andromeda. They chained Andromeda to a rock on the coast for the Cetus, but she was saved by Perseus who ended up marrying her. At the wedding, Phineus, her original betrothed, showed up and started a fight because he was supposed to marry her. Perseus used the head of Medusa to win the fight and ended up accidentally killing Cassiopeia and Cepheus in the process. Cassiopeia’s constellation, in the shape of a W, is supposed to represent her chained to her throne. As punishment for her vanity, her constellation is circumpolar, never setting below the horizon, and she is sometimes suspended in an undignified position.
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This image was produced using a Canon Ti7 camera with a 50mm lens to take twenty images with 30 second exposures of light and dark frames. The program Siril was then used to stack the images taken and apply the stacked, master dark frame before correcting for the background and stretching the image via arcsine and histogram stretching to make more stars visible.
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