Constellations · 88
The 88 constellations
Every region of the sky has a page: the myth or the history behind the figure, its brightest stars and the deep-sky objects inside it, how big it is, and — from wherever you are standing — whether it is up tonight.
The figures to find first
Bright, big and unmistakable — the constellations most people can already name.
- Andromeda The chained princess — and, beside her knee, the farthest thing most people will ever see with their own eyes.
- Aquila Zeus’s eagle, which carried his thunderbolts — flying down the Milky Way with Altair, one of the nearest bright stars, at its heart.
- Auriga The charioteer, carrying a she-goat and her kids on his arm. Capella, “the little she-goat”, is the sixth-brightest star in the sky.
- Canis Major Orion’s larger hunting dog, carrying Sirius — the brightest star in the night sky, whose rising once announced the flooding of the Nile.
- Cassiopeia The vain queen, bound to her throne and swung upside down around the pole every night as her punishment. Her W never sets from most of the north.
- Crux The Southern Cross: the smallest constellation, and one of the best loved — on the flags of Australia, New Zealand, Brazil, Samoa and Papua New Guinea.
- Cygnus The swan flying south down the Milky Way, its body the Northern Cross. Here the first black hole was found.
- Gemini The twins Castor and Pollux, side by side. Castor, it turns out, is six stars in one.
- Leo The Nemean lion Hercules strangled for his first labour — one of the few constellations that actually looks like its name.
- Lyra The lyre of Orpheus, whose music could charm stones. Its star Vega was the first star ever photographed and will be our pole star again.
- Orion The hunter — recognised as a person by cultures on every continent, and a nursery where stars are being born tonight.
- Pegasus The winged horse, born from Medusa’s blood. Its body is the Great Square, and near it, in 1995, the first planet around a Sun-like star was found.
- Perseus The hero with Medusa’s head in his hand. Her evil eye is Algol, the “Demon Star”, which winks every three days.
- Scorpius The scorpion that killed Orion, still chasing him across the sky — one of the few constellations that looks exactly like its name.
- Taurus The bull Zeus became to carry off Europa. Its fiery eye is Aldebaran, and on its shoulder ride the Pleiades.
- Ursa Major The Great Bear — the nymph Callisto, turned into a bear and flung into the sky. Its seven brightest stars are the Big Dipper, or the Plough.
- Ursa Minor The Little Bear — or the Little Dipper — whose tail ends in Polaris, the North Star, almost exactly at the pole of the sky.
The rest of the classical sky
Fainter figures with the oldest stories.
- Aquarius The water-bearer — Ganymede, pouring water from a jar into the mouth of the Southern Fish. One of the oldest recorded constellations.
- Ara The altar on which the gods swore allegiance before their war with the Titans. The Milky Way rises above it like smoke.
- Aries The golden ram whose fleece Jason sailed to find. Two thousand years ago the Sun crossed the equator here in spring — the “First Point of Aries”.
- Boötes The herdsman chasing the Great Bear around the pole — shaped like a kite, and holding the brightest star in the northern sky.
- Cancer The crab Hera sent to nip Hercules’ heel while he fought the Hydra. Faint, but it holds a swarm of stars the ancients called the Manger.
- Capricornus A goat with the tail of a fish — one of the oldest constellations of all, first drawn in Bronze Age Babylon.
- Carina The keel of the Argo, the Argonauts’ ship. It holds Canopus, the second-brightest star at night, and a nebula bigger and brighter than Orion’s.
- Centaurus The wise centaur Chiron, teacher of heroes. Its brightest star is the Sun’s nearest neighbour — a triple system 4.4 light-years away.
- Cepheus King Cepheus, husband of Cassiopeia — shaped like a child’s drawing of a house. One of its stars became a ruler for the universe.
- Cetus The sea monster sent to devour Andromeda — a huge, dim constellation with one of astronomy’s most remarkable stars in its neck.
- Corona Borealis The northern crown — a small, lovely semicircle of stars. Its one star that sleeps for 80 years and then flares is overdue.
- Delphinus The dolphin who persuaded the sea-nymph Amphitrite to marry Poseidon. Small, bright and very dolphin-like — and two of its stars carry a secret joke.
- Draco The dragon that guarded the golden apples of the Hesperides, coiling around the pole. Its star Thuban was the pole star when the pyramids were built.
- Eridanus A celestial river winding from Orion’s foot almost to the south pole of the sky, ending in Achernar — “the river’s end”.
- Grus The crane, one of the Dutch navigators’ birds, flying with its long neck outstretched below the Southern Fish.
- Hercules The greatest hero of Greek myth, kneeling upside down with his foot on the dragon’s head — and carrying the finest star cluster in the northern sky.
- Hydra The largest constellation in the sky: the many-headed serpent Hercules killed, stretched more than a quarter of the way round the heavens.
- Lepus The hare, crouched at Orion’s feet — the prey of the hunter and his dogs.
- Libra The scales — the only zodiac sign that is not a living thing. They were once the Scorpion’s claws, and their stars still carry the name.
- Lupus The wolf, speared by the Centaur. The Greeks just called it “the beast”; the Romans made it a wolf.
- Ophiuchus The serpent-bearer — the healer Asclepius, wrestling a snake. The Sun passes through him every year, making him the thirteenth sign of the zodiac.
- Pisces Two fish tied together by their tails — Venus and her son Cupid, turned into fish to escape the monster Typhon. The spring equinox lies here now.
- Piscis Austrinus The southern fish, drinking the water the Water-bearer pours. Its mouth is Fomalhaut, “the Autumn Star”, alone in a watery sky.
- Puppis The stern (the poop deck) of the Argonauts’ ship Argo — the one piece still with a star catalogue at its original letters.
- Sagittarius The archer, aiming at the Scorpion’s heart — and at the centre of the galaxy, which lies just past the tip of his arrow.
- Sculptor The sculptor’s workshop, a faint patch of sky that contains the South Galactic Pole — looking out of the Milky Way at a wealth of galaxies.
- Serpens The serpent held by Ophiuchus — the only constellation in two pieces, its head on one side of him and its tail on the other.
- Triangulum The triangle — a small, simple, ancient figure, which Greeks compared to the Nile delta and to Sicily. It holds our second-nearest big galaxy.
- Triangulum Australe The southern triangle: three bright stars, so simple a shape that it was set in the sky by the Dutch in the 1590s and never changed.
- Vela The sails of the Argo. Its brightest stars, with Carina’s, form the False Cross, which has misled navigators looking for the real one.
- Virgo The maiden holding an ear of wheat — the harvest goddess. Behind her lies a cluster of more than a thousand galaxies.
The modern fillers
Drawn in the 17th and 18th centuries to tidy the gaps and the far south — an air pump, a microscope, a painter’s easel.
- Antlia An air pump — the kind that Robert Boyle and Denis Papin used for their vacuum experiments. The Abbé de Lacaille honoured it in 1756.
- Apus The bird of paradise — a Dutch navigators’ figure, named for a bird Europeans thought had no feet and lived its whole life in the air.
- Caelum The engraver’s chisel: one of the faintest constellations, which Lacaille added in 1756 to honour the artist’s craft.
- Camelopardalis A giraffe, invented in 1612 to fill the empty sky between the pole and Perseus. It is large, faint, and full of surprises.
- Canes Venatici The hunting dogs held on a leash by Boötes, chasing the Bears. Faint to the eye, rich to a telescope: the first spiral galaxy was seen here.
- Canis Minor Orion’s smaller dog: two stars, and one of them, Procyon, is among the nearest bright stars — “before the dog”, since it rises just ahead of Sirius.
- Chamaeleon The chameleon, one of the Dutch navigators’ creatures, crawling close to the south pole of the sky — right next to the fly it is trying to catch.
- Circinus A draughtsman’s compass, beside the set square of Norma — the tools of 18th-century geometry, placed in the sky by Lacaille.
- Columba Noah’s dove, flying back to the Ark with an olive branch. The Argo was just beside it, so perhaps it was the dove Jason released to test the Clashing Rocks.
- Coma Berenices Queen Berenice’s hair — one of only two constellations named for a real person. She cut off her famous locks to thank the gods for her husband’s safe return from war.
- Corona Australis The southern crown, a small arc of stars at the Archer’s feet — the wreath Dionysus set in the sky when he brought his mother Semele back from the underworld.
- Corvus The crow, punished for lying to Apollo — cursed to be black, and to perch forever next to a cup of water it cannot drink.
- Crater The cup of Apollo, riding on the back of Hydra beside the crow who failed to fill it.
- Dorado A dorado — the dolphinfish Dutch sailors caught in the tropics. Most of the Large Magellanic Cloud, a galaxy beside ours, lies inside it.
- Equuleus The little horse — the second-smallest constellation, a head poking out beside Pegasus. One of Ptolemy’s original 48.
- Fornax A chemist’s furnace — Lacaille’s tribute to the young science of chemistry, in the decades when it was learning what fire actually is.
- Horologium A pendulum clock, honouring Christiaan Huygens, who invented it. Lacaille put it in the sky in 1756.
- Hydrus The little water snake — the southern counterpart of Hydra, winding between the two Magellanic Clouds.
- Indus An Indian — drawn by Dutch navigators in the 1590s, probably picturing a native person of the Americas or the East Indies they had met on their voyages.
- Lacerta The lizard, squeezed in 1687 between Cygnus and Andromeda. Its stars make a little zigzag.
- Leo Minor The little lion, a faint triangle of stars under the Great Bear, added by Hevelius in 1687.
- Lynx The lynx — named because, according to Hevelius, you need the eyes of a lynx to see it.
- Mensa Table Mountain, above Cape Town — the only constellation named after a place on Earth, where Lacaille charted the southern sky.
- Microscopium The microscope, a faint 18th-century tribute to the instrument that opened another invisible world.
- Monoceros The unicorn, drawn in 1612 across a patch of Milky Way between Orion and the dogs. Its stars are faint; its nebulae are famous.
- Musca The fly, under the Southern Cross. First drawn by Dutch navigators as a bee, it is the only insect in the modern sky.
- Norma A carpenter’s set square — Lacaille’s tribute to the instruments of geometry, lying in the Milky Way beside the Scorpion.
- Octans The octant — the navigator’s instrument — and the home of the south celestial pole, which has no bright star to mark it.
- Pavo The peacock, drawn by Dutch navigators in the 1590s after the exotic birds they saw on their voyage to the East Indies.
- Phoenix The phoenix, the bird that burns and rises from its own ashes — a Dutch navigators’ constellation from the 1590s.
- Pictor The painter’s easel. Among its faint stars is a young sun with a disc of dust — a solar system being made.
- Pyxis The mariner’s compass, set by Lacaille beside the pieces of the old ship Argo, as if the ship had lost it.
- Reticulum The reticle — the crosshairs Lacaille used in his telescope eyepiece to measure star positions.
- Sagitta The arrow — the third-smallest constellation. Perhaps the one Hercules fired at the eagle tormenting Prometheus, or Apollo’s arrow, or Cupid’s.
- Scutum The shield of John III Sobieski, King of Poland, who broke the Ottoman siege of Vienna in 1683 — one of only two constellations named for a real person.
- Sextans The sextant with which Johannes Hevelius measured star positions — lost when fire destroyed his observatory in 1679.
- Telescopium The telescope — Lacaille’s tribute to the instrument that had transformed astronomy, drawn as a long aerial telescope on a pole.
- Tucana The toucan, a Dutch navigators’ bird, perched with the Small Magellanic Cloud and a glorious globular cluster in its beak.
- Volans The flying fish, which leapt from the waves around the ships of the Dutch explorers, pursued by the dorado that swims beside it.
- Vulpecula The little fox, which Hevelius drew with a goose in its jaws. Faint, but it holds the first planetary nebula ever found.