COOL! A new star becomes visible this year.
https://www.almanac.com/new-star-night-sky-2022
By Bob Berman 2018
“A star is born! If you’ve followed my column, you may recall me saying that a new star will appear in the night sky. . . . In 2022—only a few years from now—an odd type of exploding star called a red nova will appear in our skies in 2022.
This will be the first naked eye nova in decades. And the mechanism behind it is fascinating as well. . . .
Okay, I’m a nerd. 
very cool… now to find Cygnus…
Cygnus is easy to find in summer.
1.) Look Straight up, (no that’s not Cygnus,) You will see a really bright star. One of the three birghtest in the sky. That starr is called Vega.
2.) Look North east of Vega you will see a cross. Sailors used to call that "the Northern Cross
The Greeks called it Cygnus. The short parts of teh cross are its wings.
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Cygnus, btw, is probabaly the COOLEST constellation in the sky. Along the neck part there is a BLACK HOLE called Cygnus X-1. I would tell you exactly where on the neck to look for it only umm, you can’t see it, because, well, it’s a black hole.
From the article:
"Because this star system is 1800 light years away, which is six times closer than that Scorpius star, the nova should be bright enough to be seen with the naked eye. "
Does that mean the red nova actually happened 1800 years ago, and the light is just getting here now?
Yes. That is my understanding.
not going to happen
if something is 1800 LY away it takes teh light that long to reach us so we see events that happened in the past
the andromeda galaxy is 3M light years away. the light we see today was emitted 3m years ago.
right now im photograhing something 600 ly away before moving to something 60M light years away (a chain of galaxies)
Yes. We will never be able to wrap our heads around it, especially when we start talking billions of light years away.
Imagine traveling for billions of years at the speed of light and still not get where you want to go. Yikes.
or to put it another way
1800 light years is 10,260,000,000,000,000 miles
What??? Arrgh sheesh I wish these scientists would stop changing their minds already. Is Pluto a planet or isn’t it? Will the new “star” appear or not? Were there fossils on mars or not? Who can I blame for this? (wink)
wow… I didn’t know that there was actually a black hole in Cygnus
been listening to this song (Cygnus X-1) for decades and never knew the actual astronomy behind the lyrics…
Thus, faster than even the speed of light is … the speed of thought.
Kind of what anti-vaxers have been saying too. 
LOL weird how stuff like that happens sometimes. There are threads on Quora.com (and other places) titled "I was today years old when . . . " discussing things tha had been obvious for years but we finally “got them” later. Like when you realize a word you’ve been using your whole life is a palindrome.
Lyra (a minor constellation with one really bright star) and Deneb (a really bright star in the Cygnus constellation) are easy to see in the sumer sky. In a way, Rush really is giving directions how to find Cygnus X-1.
It was actually found by “taking an X-ray of the sky.” For reasons I don’t understand, X-rays escape black holes. If you measured the natural X-rays coming from the sky you might expect they would correlate to the (visible) stars. But when scientists actually tried that, they found a large amount of X-rays coming from spots with no stars. And there, they sometimes found black holes.
MORE TRIVIA: There is a large star (20-40 times larger than our sun) circling Cygnus X-1 the way a turd circles a toilet bowl. It’s called HDE 226868. I think we should have a contest and give it a “real” name.
xrays dont really escape from the black hole.
around the black hole is something called the accretion disk which is matter that is spiraling into the black hole. as it spirals in between the gravitational pull and teh extreme magnetic fields stuff in the disk heats up so much it starts giving off x rays. once it crosses the event horizon into the hole the xrays stop
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Touché
Except that gravity is instantaneous. The sun is 92 million miles away. The sun you feel on your skin in summer left the sun 8 mintues ago, BUT if star (or a planet, or moon or enemy starship in a nerd game), left warp relatively near you. it would suck before you see it.
Thank you. I will file that away.
Yep, it took the light of that nova 1800 years to travel about 108,000,000,000,000,000,000 miles for us to finally see what happened.
