Phobos & Vega - Limited Edition of 8 Photograph

Mayram Maryam, "Phobos & Vega", ("Martian series"), 2020, unique author's technique, 90 x 90 cm. Phobos is the innermost and larger of the two natural satellites of Mars, the other being Deimos. Both moons were discovered in 1877 by American astronomer Asaph Hall. Phobos is a small, irregularly shaped object with a mean radius of 11 km (7 mi) and is seven times as massive as the outer moon, Deimos. Phobos is named after the Greek god Phobos, a son of Ares (Mars) and Aphrodite (Venus). Phobos orbits 6,000 km (3,700 mi) from the Martian surface, closer to its primary body than any other known planetary moon. It is so close that it orbits Mars much faster than Mars rotates, and completes an orbit in just 7 hours and 39 minutes. As a result, from the surface of Mars it appears to rise in the west, move across the sky in 4 hours and 15 minutes or less, and set in the east, twice each Martian day. Phobos is one of the least reflective bodies in the Solar System, with an albedo of just 0.071. Surface temperatures range from about −4 °C (25 °F) on the sunlit side to −112 °C (−170 °F) on the shadowed side. The defining surface feature is the large impact crater, Stickney, which takes up a substantial proportion of the moon's surface. In November 2018, astronomers concluded that the many grooves on Phobos were caused by boulders ejected from the asteroid impact that created Stickney and rolled around on the surface of the moon. An alternative theory is that the grooves are stretch marks caused by tidal forces. Images and models indicate that Phobos may be a rubble pile held together by a thin crust, and that it is being torn apart by tidal interactions. Phobos gets closer to Mars by about 2 meters every one hundred years, and it is predicted that within 30 to 50 million years it will either collide with the planet, or break up into a planetary ring. Vega is the brightest star in the northern constellation of Lyra. It has the Bayer designation α Lyrae, which is Latinised to Alpha Lyrae and abbreviated Alpha Lyr or α Lyr. This star is relatively close at only 25 light-years from the Sun, and, together with Arcturus and Sirius, one of the most luminous stars in the Sun's neighborhood. It is the fifth-brightest star in the night sky, and the second-brightest star in the northern celestial hemisphere, after Arcturus. Vega has been extensively studied by astronomers, leading it to be termed “arguably the next most important star in the sky after the Sun”. Vega was the northern pole star around 12,000 BC and will be so again around the year 13,727, when the declination will be +86°14'. Vega was the first star other than the Sun to be photographed and the first to have its spectrum recorded. It was one of the first stars whose distance was estimated through parallax measurements. Vega has functioned as the baseline for calibrating the photometric brightness scale and was one of the stars used to define the zero point for the UBV photometric system. Vega is only about a tenth of the age of the Sun, but since it is 2.1 times as massive, its expected lifetime is also one tenth of that of the Sun; both stars are at present approaching the midpoint of their life expectancies. Vega has an unusually low abundance of the elements with a higher atomic number than that of helium. Vega is also a variable star that varies slightly in brightness. It is rotating rapidly with a velocity of 236 km/s at the equator. This causes the equator to bulge outward due to centrifugal effects, and, as a result, there is a variation of temperature across the star's photosphere that reaches a maximum at the poles. From Earth, Vega is observed from the direction of one of these poles. Based on an observed excess emission of infrared radiation, Vega appears to have a circumstellar disk of dust. This dust is likely to be the result of collisions between objects in an orbiting disk, which is analogous to the Kuiper belt in the Solar System. Stars that display an infrared excess due to dust emission are termed Vega-like stars.

Photography:Color on Paper

Artist Produced Limited Edition of:8

Size:35.4 W x 35.4 H x 0.1 D in

Delivery Time:Typically 5-7 business days for domestic shipments, 10-14 business days for international shipments.