Pavo
Origin
Pavo was invented in the 1590s by the navigators Keyser and de Houtman, representing the peacocks they encountered when they were traveling in and mapping places in southeast Asia and Oceania.
Bright Stars
Alpha Pavonis or Peacock is a very bright star (magnitude 2.12) often used in navigation. Other bright stars in this constellation include Beta (magnitude 3.60) and Delta (magnitude 3.64) Pavonis.
Photo of the constellation Pavo 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
Pavo
English name
The Peacock
Pronunciation
PAY-vo
Abbreviation
Pav
Notable Objects
Pavo includes NGC 6752, a globular cluster roughly 13,500 light-years away that is easily bright enough to be seen through binoculars, and NGC 6744, a galaxy just over 29 million light-years away, only just bright enough to see through binoculars.
