This page describes an image Tucana Constellation Map
Download PDF File (PDF file 161.52 kB)
Diagram caption:
The constellation Tucana with its bright stars and surrounding constellations. Tucana is surrounded by (going clockwise from the top): Grus, Indus, Octans, Hydrus, Eridanus and Phoenix.
Tucana is a southern constellation and thus the whole constellation is visible at some point in the year throughout the southern hemisphere. The whole constellation is visible to some equatorial regions of the northern hemisphere with parts of the constellation visible to the remaining northern equatorial regions. Tucana is best viewed in the northern hemisphere autumn and southern hemisphere spring.
The Small Magellanic Cloud (SMC), a satellite galaxy of the Milky Way lies in Tucana with a small part spilling over into the neighbouring constellation of Hydrus. The SMC is marked here with a green loop in the south east of Tucana. The globular clusters NGC 104, also known as 47 Tucanae or 47 Tuc, and NGC 362 lie in Tucana and are marked here with yellow circles with plus signs superimposed on them. While these two clusters appear close to the SMC on the sky, they are both significantly closer than that satellite galaxy.
The y-axis of this diagram is in degrees of declination with north as up and the x-axis is in hours of right ascension with east to the left. The sizes of the stars marked here relate to the star's apparent magnitude, a measure of its apparent brightness. The larger dots represent brighter stars. The Greek letters mark the brightest stars in the constellation. These are ranked by brightness with the brightest star being labeled alpha, the second brightest beta, etc., although this ordering is not always followed exactly. The dotted boundary lines mark the IAU's boundaries of the constellations and the solid green lines mark one of the common forms used to represent the figures of the constellations. Neither the constellation boundaries, nor the lines joining the stars appear on the sky.
Diagram credit: Adapted by the IAU Office of Astronomy for Education from the original by the IAU and Sky & Telescope. Credit Link
Related glossary terms:
Apparent Magnitude
, Celestial Coordinates
, Constellation
, Declination
, Globular Cluster
, Right Ascension (RA)
, Small Magellanic Cloud (SMC)
Categories:
Naked Eye Astronomy
Diagram license: Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) icons
The diagram captions presented on the OAE website were written, translated and reviewed by a collective effort from the OAE, the OAE Centers and Nodes, the OAE National Astronomy Education Coordinators (NAECs) and other volunteers. You can find a full list of credits for our translation project here. All media file captions are released under a Creative Commons CC BY-4.0 license and should be credited to "IAU OAE". The media files themselves may have different licenses (see above) and should be credited as listed above under "credit".
If you notice a error in this diagram or its caption then please get in touch.
