Columba
Origin
Columba is a faint constellation located just south of Canis Major. It is low in the sky for mid-northern latitudes and is considered a southern constellation. Columba was designated in the 16th century and its name is Latin for dove.
Bright Stars
Columba is a faint constellation with few bright stars. The brightest star, Alpha Columbae (known by its Arabic name Phact), is a blue-white star about 268 light-years from Earth. The only other named star is Beta Columbae, an orange star known as Wazn that is 87 light-years distant.
Photo of the constellation Columba 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
Columba
Pronunciation
ko-LUM-ba
Abbreviation
Col
Notable Objects
A few object that can be found in Columba:
- NGC 1851 is a 7th-magnitude globular cluster that lies about 39,000 light-years away. Its mass is about 550,000 times that of our Sun.
- NGC 1808 is a barred spiral galaxy located about 42 million light-years away and shining at 10th magnitude. NGC 1808 has a high rate of star formation as a result of a recent interaction with the nearby galaxy NGC 1792.
