Mensa

Origin

The constellation of Mensa is located in the southern hemisphere, near the south celestial pole. Its name is Latin for a table. Mensa is one of the faintest constellations in the sky, with almost no stars visible from urban areas. “It contains part of the Large Magellanic Cloud which was giving it its name. This table originally referred to the Table Mountain in Cape Town, South Africa, and it was called “Mons Mensae”. In the 1750s while observing from South Africa, Lacaille imagined the LMC similar to the so-called “Cape Cloud”, the cloud above the Table Mountain that covers the mountain like a table cloth and was used as a weather sign by contemporary navigators.

Bright Stars

Alpha Mensae is the brightest star in the constellation Mensa, at a magnitude of 5.09.

Photo of the constellation Mensa 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