Eta Carinae is one of the most remarkable stars in the heavens.
This star was first cataloged by Edmond Halley in 1677, as a star of fourth magnitude. Since, its brightness has varied in a most remarkable way: In 1730, its brightness reached mag 2, and again fell to mag 4 in about 1782. It brightened again about 1801 and faded back to 4th magnitude in 1811. In 1820, Eta began to brighten steadily, reaching 2nd magnitude in 1822 and 1st mag in 1827. After this first preliminary maximum, the star faded back to mag 2 for about 5 years, then rose again to about mag 0. After a further slight decline, Eta’s brightness incresed once more and reached its maximal brilliance of nearly -1.0 in April 1843, when it outshone all stars in the sky but Sirius. After this brilliant show, the star slowly faded continuously, and became invisible in 1868. Interrupted by two minor outbursts around 1870 and 1889, Eta Carinae faded to about 8th magnitude around 1900, where it remained until 1941. At that time, the star began to brighten again, and reached 7th magnitude about 1953. Slowly and steadily, Eta Carinae became brighter until about 6th magnitude in the early 1990s - the star reached naked-eye visibility again at that time. Then in 1998-99, the star suddenly brightened by about a factor two. This behavior is not fully understood at this time (early 2000), and it seems hard to predict how this remarcable variable will develop in the future.
Eta Carinae is one of the most massive stars in the universe, with probably more than 100 solar masses (Jeff Hester of the ASU, who made this HST image, has estimated 150 times the mass of our sun, Robert Zimmermann gives 120 solar masses in his article in Astronomy, Feb. 2000 issue). It is about 4 million times brighter than our local star, making it also one of the most luminous stars known. Eta Carinae radiates 99 % of its luminosity in the infrared part of the spectrum, where it is the brightest object in the sky at 10-20 microns wavelength.
As such massive stars have a comparatively short expected lifetime of roughly 1 million years, Eta Carinae must have formed recently in the cosmic timescale; it is actually situated in the heavily star forming nebula NGC 3372, called the Great Carina Nebula, or the Eta Carinae Nebula. It will probably end its life in a supernova explosion within the next few 100,000 years (some astronomers speculate that this will occur even sooner).
http://seds.org/messier/xtra/ngc/etacar.html
Does anyone have a “map” that would show where were are in the Milky Way Galaxy vs where Eta Carinae is? If I read the link post 4 correctly it’s about 10,000 light years away, but in which direction?