Constellations · Constellation · Carinae · Car
Constellation
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.
- Genitive
- Carinae
- Area
- 494 square degrees · 34th of 88
- Brightest star
- Canopus · magnitude -0.62
- Naked-eye stars
- 225 brighter than magnitude 6.5
- Highest at midnight
- mid February
History
Ptolemy’s giant ship Argo Navis was so unwieldy that Nicolas-Louis de Lacaille split it in the 1750s into the keel, the stern and the sails.
Did you know
Canopus is so bright, and so far south, that spacecraft use it as a guide star to know which way they are pointing.
Look for
The Carina Nebula is visible to the naked eye. Inside it Eta Carinae, a star perhaps a hundred times the Sun’s mass, erupted in the 1840s and briefly became the second-brightest star in the sky.