We have another of the modern and dull constellations, quite possibly Camelopardalis the Giraffe is one of the dullest of the northern constellations. It was first created by the Dutch astronomer Petrus Plancius around 1613. There are some suggestions that originally the constellation represented a camel rather than a giraffe.
With
Camelopardalis being a modern constellation there are no myths and legends
associated with it.
Although the
18th largest constellation in the sky there are no bright stars and
only alpha and beta might be glimpsed with the naked eye.
The
brightest star is beta with a magnitude of 4.0 it is a G class supergiant and
is cooler than the Sun, it lies around 870 light years away. It is a triple
star system although you would need a telescope to see the two companion stars.
Beta is the
brightest star in Camelopardalis at magnitude 4.0 Its a G1 supergiant 870 light
years away.
Although
alpha should be the brightest star using the Bayer system it isn’t with a
magnitude of 4.2. As in the case with beta any sort of mist haze or moonlight
would mean that both stars would be impossible to see with the naked eye.
However,
alpha is interesting because it is one of the rare O class supergiant stars.
Its surface temperature is a whopping 29,000 degrees compared with just 5,800
for our Sun. It lies at a massive 6,000 light years from Earth. I think we can
safely say that at some point in the future this star is going to become a
supernova and destroy itself in a massive explosion.
The only
other star of interest here is the variable star Z Camelopardalis which is the
prototype star for the Z Camelopardalis group of stars. It is known as a
cataclysmic type variable star it is a dwarf nova, the mechanism behind the
outbursts is different from classical nova. Dwarf Nova are fainter than the
more classical nova. It varies in brightness between magnitude 9.8 to 14.5
meaning that a telescope is needed to observe it at all times.
The star was
discovered in photographs taken in 1904 by Henry Park Hollis 1858-1939 a
British astronomer who worked at the Royal Greenwich Observatory in London.
The only dep
sky object I will refer you to is Kemble’s Cascade. It is an apparent line of
more than 20 stars with brightnesses of between the 5th and 10th
magnitude. It appears to flow into the open cluster NGC 1502.
Kemble’s
Cascade is what is known as an asterism, a pattern of stars with a
constellation. The group of stars we call the Plough is an asterism within the
constellation of Ursa Major the Great Bear. The asterism was named by the
astronomer Walter Scott Houston 1912-1993 who wrote The Deep Sky Wonders collum
for the Sky and Telescope magazine from 1946-1993. He named it after a
Franciscan friar and amateur astronomer Father Lucian Kemble 1922-1999 who
wrote to Scott Houston and described it as a beautiful cascade of stars
tumbling from the north west down to the open cluster NGC 1502. The stars are
not part of the open cluster it is just a line-of-sight effect. It was after
this letter in 1980 that Kemble’s Cascade was named.
I said at
the beginning that this constellation was a faint constellation and broadly
speaking Camelopardalis fills the large area of space between Capella in
Auriga, Polaris the North Star and Cassiopeia. It has been said that if you
come across an area of sky in the north with nothing in it, you have located
the Giraffe!
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