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Red Giant Star Mira and Its Companion

This is a NASA Hubble Space Telescope image of the cool red giant star Mira A (right), officially called Omicron Ceti in the constellation Cetus, and its nearby hot companion (left) taken on December 11, 1995 in visible light using the European Space Agency's Faint Object Camera (FOC). The stars in this false-color picture are separated by an angular size of only 0.6 arcseconds (equal to 70 times the distance between Earth and the Sun), but clearly resolved by the FOC. Image reconstruction techniques have been used to further enhance the details in the Mira images.

Object Name
Object NameA name or catalog number that astronomers use to identify an astronomical object.
Mira A, Omicron Ceti
Release Date
August 6, 1997
Science Release
Hubble Separates Stars in the Mira Binary System
Read the release
Credit
Credit: Margarita Karovska (Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics) and NASA

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