"can be viewed even with low-power binoculars "
does this, for most of us, really mean "might be seen with binoculars, if only it wasn't for all the light pollution"?
(can be found in kstars, for those with KDE stuff on their system)
Astroboffins have found the Sun’s long-lost sibling, separated at birth from the star which now resides at the centre of our Solar System. The Sun's much larger brother has 15 per cent greater mass and is located 110 light years away in the constellation Hercules, say boffins who are convinced it was almost certainly born …
Researchers extended their survey down to low-frequency radiation, looking for "cool effects" of the since-broken cluster, finding, among other things, the universe's oldest song....
Breaking Up is Hard to Do....
Neil Sedaka is older than we thought....
C'mon, AManFromMars, what's your take on this?
Really?? A lot of things can happen in 4.5 billion years? Thanks for that keen insight there, doc!!
Of course a lot of the Sun's siblings might have been significantly larger stars, and will have since exhausted their nuclear fuel and burned out/blown up. And a lot of them are probably brown dwarfs, which will burn for 10s of billions of years, but are hard to see because of their comparative dimness.
I am a real amateur astronomer. The pros seldom look up from their computer monitors, and through an eyepiece. They type in a number of coordinates to slew their scope to the object. In the real world, the finder map coming with this article is totally worthless. Yes, under a dark sky you will need the finder stars to know where to point your binoculars or telescope. Pollution is not an issue here, just as long as you can see those other stars, because what we are looking at is just beyond normal vision. Problem is, HD 162826 is one of three similarly bright stars closely visually associated in a three-stars arc, and you cannot make out which one is your target, even while looking at it, without a good finder map. I have prepared finder maps for binoculars and reflector telescope, along with an essay on this star, that will allow you to both see AND identify our sun's sibling: astronomy [hyphen] links [dot] net/Stella [dot] html
Yes, the stars and constellations do rotate as they go across the sky. It's all simple mathematics. In this case, you only need to be where the constellation Hercules is visible, and then look for the famous asterism known as the keystone. It shows very clearly in the professional map. From there, use the two stars as shown to find where to point your instrument. You will still need a better finder chart to pick out Sol's sister in the three-stars arc.
If you are now in Wellington, NZ, or somewhere of similar latitude in Australia, you would see that Hercules is only barely visible above the horizon, due to its northern skies location. Right now, our sibling star only comes about 5 degrees above the horizon in NZ, about 2:30 a.m. To see it you would need pristine clear, dark skies toward the north.