Camelopardalis
Origin
Camelopardis was invented in 1612 by Petrus Plancius, it represents a giraffe. The Greek name comes from the words for camel and leopard, because it was thought to look similar to a camel and its coloring looks similar to that of a leopard.
Bright Stars
The brightest star in Camelopardalis is Beta Cam which is a double star with apparent magnitude 4.03; the next-brightest are CS Cam and Alpha Cam at magnitude 4.21 and 4.3, respectively. Alpha Cam is one of the most distant stars visible to the naked eye at over 6000 light-years away.
Photo of the constellation Camelopardalis produced by NOIRLab in collaboration with Eckhard Slawik, a German astrophotographer.
The annotations are from a standardized set of 88 western IAU constellations and stick figures from Sky & Telescope. Please find here a non-annotated version of the image.
Credit: E. Slawik/NOIRLab/NSF/AURA/M. Zamani
Latin name
English name
Camelopardalis
Pronunciation
ca-MEL-oh-PAR-dal-iss
Abbreviation
Cam
Notable Objects
Since the location of Camelopardalis in the night sky faces away from the brighter Milky Way, or galactic plane, it is easier to image distant galaxies, a number of which you can see below, and include:
- NGC 2403, or Caldwell 7, is a spiral galaxy about 10 million light-years away.
- IC 342 is a starburst galaxy about 11 million light-years away
