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Latest comment: 17 years ago1 comment1 person in discussion
History: write about how it was subdivided when the constellations were defined to be areas, not lines and conventions. Rursus declamavi; 21:29, 13 February 2007 (UTC)Reply
Indeed. The other half was missed. The corresponding SVG has been uploaded to Commons. Once the file name is corrected on Commons, then this can be fixed. Kxx (talk | contribs) 03:49, 22 March 2012 (UTC)Reply
Someone (@StringTheory11:), seeing my (now successful) nomination of fluorine and my multiple GA reviews, asked me to come over here and review this constellation. Now that the FAC is done and passed, let's get here. ParclyTaxel01:45, 17 August 2014 (UTC)Reply
Bold text in the quotations indicates errors that need to be replaced with the italic text. Lead
"Part of the Milky Way passes through Serpens Cauda, which is thustherefore rich in deep-sky objects, such as the Eagle Nebula (IC 4703) and its associated star cluster Messier 16."
History
"In some ancient atlases, the constellations Serpens and Ophiuchus were depicted as two separate constellations, although in most they were shown as a single constellation. Back in this time, there were no official constellation boundaries, so when depicted separately, their bodies were not intertwined with each other."
"inIn Chinese astronomy, most of the stars of Serpens represented part of a wall surrounding a marketplace, known as Tianshi, which was in Ophiuchus and part of Hercules."
"It appears that Mušḫuššu was depicted as a hybrid of a dragon, a lion and a bird, and loosely correspondscorresponded to Hydra."
Notable features Head stars
"The brightest star in Serpens, Alpha Serpentis, also known as Unukalhaior Unukalhai, is a red giant of spectral type K2III located approximately 22.68 parsecs (74.0 ly) away which marks the snake's heart."
"Located near Alpha is Lambda Serpentis, a magnitude 4.42 star rather similar to the Sun located relatively close to Earth at only 12.12 parsecs (39.5 ly) distantaway."
"The Mira variable R Serpentis, located between Beta and Gamma, is visible to the naked eye at its maximum brightness of 5.16, but, typical of Mira variables, it can fade to below magnitude 14."
"The primary, ana white subgiant, is a Delta Scuti variable with an average apparent magnitude of 4.23."
Tail stars
"The eclipses of the system are very erratic, and although there are two proposed theories as to why, neither of them is completely consistent with today'scurrent understanding of stars."
"Since Serpens is regarded as one constellation despite being split into two halves, the ordering of Bayer and Flamsteed designations go roughly in order of brightness among both halves (i.e. there is only one Alpha, one Beta, etc. in the entire constellation). Only one star in Serpens is brighter than third magnitude, so the constellation is not easy to perceive." (Stars)
You know, I'll just remove this bit. The first part about Bayer designations going in order of decreasing brightness isn't quite accurate, since right ascension is also involved, and it would be next to impossible to actually find a source that says this specifically for Serpens (even though it's common sense). As for the second part, a one-sentence section does more harm to the flow of the article than the reader can gain from that sentence, which doesn't say anything too important. StringTheory11 (t • c) 17:35, 18 August 2014 (UTC)Reply
"USS Serpens (AK-97) was a United States Navy Crater class cargo ship named after the constellation." (Namesakes) This claim doesn't look like it is relevant, let alone belongs, to the article; maybe it could be removed? ParclyTaxel10:13, 18 August 2014 (UTC)Reply
At this point, I've gotten everything on the essential list apart from L134/L183. For these larger constellations, things that would certainly make it into smaller constellation articles, such as those on the nice to have list, just can't find a way into the article. I'll ask Mike Peel what he thinks, though. StringTheory11 (t • c) 16:06, 24 June 2015 (UTC)Reply
Latest comment: 9 years ago25 comments2 people in discussion
@StringTheory11: in response to your request at [1], here's some suggestions. Apologies for not getting back to you sooner! I want to spend more time reading through this article, and offering more suggestions for improvement, but this is probably enough to get on with for now!
"Serpens is the only one of the 88 modern constellations to be split into two disconnected regions in the sky" - were there any other (non-modern) constellations that were similarly split?
Before the boundaries were set up, there were no well-defined barriers between constellations, so I don't think it's meaningful to refer to historical constellations as having either a continuous or divided region. I did do a search, though, and was unable to find anything.StringTheory11 (t • c) 00:37, 7 July 2015 (UTC)Reply
"108 stars in total are brighter than magnitude 6.5" - add why magnitude 6.5 is significant here?
"Serpens Caput's boundaries, as set by Eugène Delporte in 1930" - it would be good to cover more of the definition of the constellation in the 'history' section.
I added some stuff here; how does it look now? I don't want to get too much into stuff that relates solely to Ophiuchus and not to Serpens.StringTheory11 (t • c) 17:51, 7 July 2015 (UTC)Reply
For the IAU definition, it might be worth referencing [2] too.
"See also: List of stars in Serpens" - the formatting of this looks odd, where did the indentation go? It also looks a bit odd not having any text in the 'Stars' section before getting to the 'Head stars' section, maybe add a short paragraph summarising the key stars (and later, objects) in both constellation regions? (altohugh TBH, I'm not sure this is absolutely necessary.) Or maybe talk about the closest/most distant/brightest/faintest of the key stars, and their distribution in spectral types?
The image was screwing with the formatting, so I moved it down a bit. As to the paragraph, I originally had something similar there, but took it out some time ago after somebody (I forget who) told me it looked out-of-place.StringTheory11 (t • c) 17:43, 6 July 2015 (UTC)Reply
"marking its heart" - should that be "marking the heart of the serpent"? Also, "or Unukalhai", perhaps say "(traditionally called Unukalhai)" instead? Link spectral type?
"the system demonstrates one of the best examples of general relativity" - this claim needs more support. How does the GR constraints compare to those from PSR J0737-3039, and other multiple-star systems containing pulsars?
"Eta Serpentis was previously classified as a carbon star, which would have made it the brightest carbon star in the sky, although this classification was found to be erroneous." - I'm not sure this needs to be in this article rather than the article about the star.
"As the Milky Way passes through it" - what does this mean? Since the stars in the constellation are all in our Galaxy, this can't be true. Do you mean the Galactic plane? (ditto the later "As the Milky Way does not pass through this part of Serpens" sentence).
"was one of the first discovered Serpentids" - without the existence of a Serpentids article, this needs some more refs to indicate whether it is a widely-recognised term or not.
Google Scholar gives over 90 refs for the term "Serpentid", nearly all of which relate to this type of star, so it does appear to be widely-used. I think I'll go ahead and create the Serpentid article soon.StringTheory11 (t • c) 17:43, 6 July 2015 (UTC)Reply
"Barely visible to the naked eye under good conditions", but in the figure caption it's described as "a naked-eye globular cluster". This isn't quite consistent!
When quoting distances and magnitudes, please give uncertainties for the values too.
For magnitudes in which the source provided uncertainties, I've given them here. For magnitudes where the source did not provide an uncertainty and for distance (where the uncertainty is different in each direction due to parallax measurements containing the uncertainty instead) I've instead reduced the precision of values here, which I think should work as well. It's unfortunate that uncertainties aren't taught until college in our education system, considering how important they are....StringTheory11 (t • c) 19:02, 8 July 2015 (UTC)Reply
Please consider using more bibcodes to the Astrophysics Data System in the references, to make it easier for readers to find open access copies of the journal articles.
A number of the references (e.g., 86-92, and 100-101, amongst others) don't seem to be displaying correctly at the moment.
At the moment, Citation bot is down, and I've had no luck finding a replacement tool, since the WMF refuses to create anything good. If it isn't up yet by the time I start an FAC, I'll fill them in manually.StringTheory11 (t • c) 17:43, 6 July 2015 (UTC)Reply
Why aren't the Levy and Ridpath references in-line refs? They look a bit odd as they are.
The constellation is split into two parts, and the equator crosses both of them. The smaller part lies mostly in the southern hemisphere and the bigger one lies mostly in the northern hemisphere. So, most of the constellation lies to the north of the equator overall. PlanetStar20:49, 10 September 2015 (UTC)Reply
level-5 vital article is rated FA-class on Wikipedia's content assessment scale.
Done. StringTheory11 (t • c) 17:35, 18 August 2014 (UTC)Reply
