Look Up - Summer is coming

In June 2018, I decided to spend a few weeks off in Portugal between stops in Riga, Latvia and Namur, Belgium. I ended up playing loads of cash games and spent a week in a cork plantation near Samora Correia (Santarem) chilling by the pool while drinking Lambrusco during the day and shooting the dark Portuguese countryside skies at night. Tough life!

Cygnus is a northern constellation lying on the plane of the Milky Way. Its name is derived from the Greek word for swan. The swan is one of the most recognisable constellations of the northern summer and autumn skies and it's also known as the Northern Cross. Cygnus was among the 48 constellations listed by the 2nd century astronomer Ptolemy and it remains one of the 88 modern constellations.

Cygnus contains Deneb, one of the brightest stars in the night sky and one corner of another formation called the Summer Triangle together with Vega and Altair. It also hosts various X-ray sources and the giant stellar association of CygnusOB2. Deneb (Arabic word for 'tail') is the tail star of the swan. One of the stars of this association, NMLCygni, is one of the largest stars currently known. NML Cygni / V1489Cygni is a red hypergiant with a radius of way more than 1 billion (!!!) km as in roughly 1.6 solar radii for some 50 million solar masses making it one of the most luminous and massive objects we know about in our entire galaxy.

The constellation is also home to CygnusX1, a distant but notable X-ray binary star combo containing a supergiant and an unseen massive companion that was the first object widely held to be a black hole.

Vega, also designated as Alpha Lyrae, is the brightest star in the constellation of Lyra. It's the fifth-brightest star in the night sky, and the second-brightest star in the northern celestial hemisphere, after Arcturus.

Live Poker is on its way back a little bit everywhere by now, so let's hope we can go back to some serious #allineverywhere soon. For those who care, I have resumed posting travel info in my POKER TRIPS section.

Below, you'll find more night sky shots and random Portuguese feel good photos I shot that specific week surrounded by cork trees. Enjoy!