When is capricorn visible in the night sky

The Greeks saw it as Amalthea, the goat that saved the life of the infant god Zeus. Over time, Capricornus was referred to more frequently as a sea goat.

In China, on the other hand, the constellation was described as a tortoise, while in the South Pacific it was viewed as a cavern. About 20 stars make up the pattern of Capricornus. It's a multiple star system and its closest member is just over a hundred light-years away from us. It's a giant yellow-colored star and is about light-years away from us. One of the more peculiar stars in Capricornus is called delta Capricorni, or Deneb Algedi, which refers to the tail of the sea-goat.

That means that one member of the star "eclipses" the other every so often, causing the brighter one to dim a bit. Astronomers are also intrigued by the chemical makeup of this strange star because it doesn't quite match the chemistry of other stars of its type.

It also appears to rotate quite rapidly. Even though the constellation lies against near the backdrop of the plane of the Milky Way Galaxy , Capricornus doesn't have a lot of easily seen deep-sky objects.

Observers with good telescopes can spy out a few very distant galaxies in its boundaries. In our own galaxy, Capricornus contains the globular star cluster called M This tightly packed spherically shaped collection of stars was first observed and cataloged by Charles Messier back in It's visible through binoculars, but stargazers with a telescope see more details, and those with even larger instruments can make out individual stars in the cluster.

M30 has more than a million times the mass of the Sun in its core, and stars that interact there affect each other in ways that astronomers are still working to understand. The tropic of Capricorn — the place where the sun appears overhead at noon on the winter solstice — originally sliced right through its namesake constellation, but the line has since shifted to go through the constellation Sagittarius. Three bright stars — Alpha-2 Capricorni, Beta Capricorni and Omega Capricorni — form a triangle that makes it easier to pick out the constellation.

The goat's tail is formed by Delta Capricorni, the brightest star in the constellation at magnitude 2. Also known as Deneb Algedi — deneb is Arabic for tail — it is a four-star system with an eclipse that can be seen with the naked eye. The second brightest star — Beta Capricorni, also known as Dabih — is a multiple-star system.

Dabih Major contains an orange bright giant and a blue-white dwarf and Dabih Minor is a binary star with an A0-giant as the primary. The two pairs are at least 21, times as far apart as the Earth and the sun. Please donate now to help keep TheSkyLive ads-free. This site cannot run without your voluntary donations. You won't see any ads here!

If you find this website useful please consider a small donation, it will help covering the hosting costs. Thank you! This ancient constellation has been known since Babylonian and Sumerian times.

The Sumerians knew it as the goat-fish. It marked the winter solstice during the early Bronze Age. The ancient Greeks associated the constellation with Amalthea, the goat that sucked the baby Zeus from his mother, Rhea, and saved him from being eaten by his father, Cronos. Capricornus is a relatively faint constellation with only one star brighter than magnitude 3. In fact, it is the second faintest constellation in the sky. Deneb Algedi is the brightest star with a visual magnitude of only 2.

It is a binary star system located 39 light years from Earth.