IotaOrionis

Iota Orionis is the brightest star in Orion's sword. I made this observation on the evening of Monday April 6th, 2009 using a XT8 with a 13mm and 5mm lens with a 2x barlow. The digital sketch here is based on a sketch made at the scope during the observation and is made using the free program GIMP.
Its Arabic name, Na’ir al Saif, means "the Bright One of the Sword." Iota Ori is actually a complex quadruple star dominated by a 15-solar-mass O star. More information can be viewed at http://www.daviddarling.info/encyclopedia/I/Iota_Orionis.html. I thought this was interesting: "Iota Ori also has connections with two stars that lie well away from it in our sky: fourth magnitude Mu Columbae, 26° to the south, and AE Aurigae, 40° to the north. These two, almost identical in spectral type to Iota Ori, are hurtling away from each other in opposite directions at 200 km/s. They are runaway stars and were apparently thrown out of the region of the Trapezium cluster some 2.7 million years ago. According to one theory, they were once part of a pair of tightly-knit binary stars. In a close encounter between the two binaries, two of the four stars were ejected, while the remaining two – the close O-B pair of Iota Ori – remained, more or less at the site of the violent event."