What do you see at these coordinates in space with your telescope?

Question

Here are the coordinates.

05:34:30,-02:10:13

Answer 1

It's an unexceptional part of space in the constellation Orion, a bit to the west of the Flame Nebula and other interesting objects.  You have specified to the arc second which is a very precise formulation.

You have not specified however which set of coordinates you mean.  The Earth's pole is tilted and moving according to precession.  This changes the coordinates, which are formally adjusted every fifty years.  With modern computers, star maps can be updated every time you boot up.  So the two main designations are J2000, which means, the coordinates as they were in 2000, and EPOCH OF DATE, which means, today.  These differences are slight but they do matter.

Looking at your coordinates for 2008 and ALSO for 2000 I don't see much of interest.   I don't see a star with those *precise* coordinates, but there's some that are close.  

Usually when people ask this question it means they have paid a star naming service to name a star after them.  In this case there's nothing there up to magnitude 16 (which is tens of thousands of times dimmer than you can see with the naked eye).  If one goes to an all-sky survey there's almost always SOMETHING there, if you look dimly enough.  But put it this way: there's nothing at those locations naked eye, and there's nothing there that can be found without photographic equipment hooked up to a telescope.

There is a star that's close, using the J2000 coordinates used by most star naming services:

Summary

Magnitude: 14.41

Position information for 27 Jul 2000 8:14:05 PM

JD: 2451753.50978

Apparent RA: 05h 34m 31.06s

Apparent Dec: -2° 10' 52.9"

Constellation: Orion

Altitude: -42° 29' 14"

Azimuth: 320° 40' 19"

Hour angle: 10h 8m 28s

Rise: 4h 13m 13s

Transit: 10h 7m 17s

Set: 16h 1m 21s

Names and Catalog Numbers

GSC catalog number: GSC-4770-0399

Most star naming services use J2000.    

Now, what we need to stress is that anyone can run a star naming service.  They have no scientific basis and exist to prey on bereaved parents, people in love, and other people who are vulnerable.   I have on my desk top a star catalog with 15,000,000 stars.  If I opened a web site, I could sell you a star.  I would tell you that it is "stored in our official database."  I might also say it is in a SECURE database by arranging to pay $5.00 a month for off-site storage of the excel files in which I would keep track of the people who bought dim stars from me.  Or I could burn them on a disk and put them in my car.  That would be off site!   I could print out a star chart and type in a label say "John Smith's Star" with an arrow pointing to the star and the whole thing neatly centered on the page.  I could frame it and mail it to you.    If I could even--but most star services are not this sophisticated--look it up on the Digitized Sky Survey and print you out a picture.    But since most people don't have a clue I could also just make up any old coordinates and most people would be happy.  A real star name looks like this: GSC-4770-0399, although other catalogs have names that are much longer, as they are trying to keep track of billions of stars in some cases (USNO B1 catalog for example: that's a real name for a real catalog).  

All that aside, Orion is a very interesting constellation rich in objects.  As I mentioned your location is close to the Flame Nebula and a bit further south the super-famous M42 a giant gaseous nebular where stars are being formed.

You can also feed your coordinates into Google sky but Google sky doesn't identify each individual star.   I'll give that a look too and if it turns up anything post a p.s.

hope that helps,

GN

p.s. Google sky shows nothing there either.  That would be J2000.   If you were sold a star at this location, you're due a refund.

pps. Injanier is correct Orion is a winter constellation and right now if you pointed at those coordinates you'd see blue sky, because it'd be daytime!  Orion rises about 4 a.m.  at this writing: very near the brightening sky of dawn, and so low in most places it would be behind distant trees or mountains.

Answer 2

wrong time of year. you will have to wait a couple of months before you can look at these coordinates just before dawn.

what were you expecting to find?

Answer 3

I'm not going to see anything through my telescope tonight; too cloudy here. But as gn reports, it's a spot about a degree south of the center of Orion's belt and there's nothing there. It's going to be a bit hard to observe for a few more weeks, anyhow, as the sun rises shortly after it does.

What were you expecting to find?