Chamaeleon
Origin
This constellation was named by Dutch navigators who were charting the southern sky and who named the new constellations they described after animals they saw in various lands of the southern hemisphere.
Bright Stars
The brightest stars in Chamaeleon are Alpha, Gamma, and Beta Chamaeleontis. With magnitudes 4.08, 4.10, and 4.38, respectively, these stars are extremely similar in brightness.
Photo of the constellation Chamaeleon 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
Chamaeleon
Pronunciation
kah-ME-lee-un
Abbreviation
Cha
Notable Objects
Though it is a small constellation, Chamaeleon contains most of the Chamaeleon Complex, a star forming region that includes the Chamaeleon I Dark Cloud, one of the nearest active star formation regions in the Milky Way. A structure known as the Chamaeleon Infrared Nebula can be found near the center of that cloud.
