The Brightest Star in the Sky Imaged with the World's most Expensive Telescope

Image of Sirius

This is an image of Sirius A and B taken with the NICMOS coronagraph on the Hubble Space Telescope as part of a search for exozodiacal dust and faint companions around nearby stars (Kuchner and Brown, 1999). At this wavelength, 1.1 microns, Sirius A is about 10.2 magnitudes brighter than the white dwarf, Sirius B, which is visible about 3.8 arcseconds to the left of Sirius A. This image is a sum of 50 exposures lasting 0.6 seconds each.


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