Diagram caption: The constellation Puppis with its bright stars and surrounding constellations. Puppis is surrounded by (going clockwise from the top): Monoceros, Canis Major, Columba, Pictor, Carina, Vela, Pyxis and Hydra.

Puppis 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 also visible to equatorial and some temperate regions of the northern hemisphere with parts of the constellation visible to all but the most arctic regions. Puppis is best viewed in the evenings in the northern hemisphere winter and southern hemisphere summer.

The open clusters M46, M93 and NGC 2477 lie in Puppis and are marked here with yellow circles. The globular cluster M47 also lies in Puppis and is marked here with a yellow circle with a cross superimposed on it.

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. Puppis was previously part of the larger Argo Navis constellation along with Vela and Carina. As the letter designations for stars were created before this division took place, Greek letter designations are now divided between the three constellations with Puppis having stars designated epsilon and zeta but no alpha, beta, gamma or delta. 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 , Right Ascension (RA)
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