A little ramble through Camelopardalis the Giraffe

 

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 18^th 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 5^th and 10^th 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!

                                          www.theramblingastronomer.co.uk