Apus
| Constellation | |
|
|
| Abbreviation | Aps |
|---|---|
| Genitive | Apodis |
| Pronunciation | /ˈeɪpəs/, genitive /ˈæpədᵻs/ |
| Symbolism | The Bird-of-Paradise |
| Right ascension | 13h 51m 07.5441s–18h 27m 27.8395s |
| Declination | −67.4800797°–−83.1200714° |
| Family | Bayer |
| Area | 206 sq. deg. (67th) |
| Main stars | 4 |
|
Bayer/Flamsteed stars |
12 |
| Stars with planets | 2 |
| Stars brighter than 3.00m | 0 |
| Stars within 10.00 pc (32.62 ly) | 0 |
| Brightest star | α Aps (3.83m) |
| Nearest star | HD 128400 (66.36 ly, 20.35 pc) |
| Messier objects | None |
| Meteor showers | None |
| Bordering constellations |
Triangulum Australe Circinus Musca Chamaeleon Octans Pavo Ara |
|
Visible at latitudes between +5° and −90°. Best visible at 21:00 (9 p.m.) during the month of July. |
|
Apus is a small constellation in the southern sky. It represents a bird-of-paradise, and its name means "without feet" in Greek because the bird-of-paradise was once wrongly believed to lack feet. First depicted on a celestial globe by Petrus Plancius in 1598, it was charted on a star atlas by Johann Bayer in his 1603 Uranometria. The French explorer and astronomer Nicolas Louis de Lacaille charted and gave the brighter stars their Bayer designations in 1756.
The five brightest stars are all reddish in hue. Shading the others at apparent magnitude 3.8 is Alpha Apodis, an orange giant that has around 48 times the diameter and 928 times the luminosity of the Sun. Marginally fainter is Gamma Apodis, another ageing giant star. Delta Apodis is a double star, the two components of which are 103 arcseconds apart and visible with the naked eye. Two star systems have been found to have planets.
Apus was one of twelve constellations created by Petrus Plancius from the observations of Pieter Dirkszoon Keyser and Frederick de Houtman who had sailed on the first Dutch trading expedition, known as the Eerste Schipvaart, to the East Indies. It first appeared on a 35-cm (14 in) diameter celestial globe published in 1598 in Amsterdam by Plancius with Jodocus Hondius. De Houtman included it in his southern star catalogue in 1603 under the Dutch name De Paradijs Voghel, "The Bird of Paradise", and Plancius called the constellation Paradysvogel Apis Indica; the first word is Dutch for "bird of paradise". Apis (Latin for "bee") is presumably a typographical error for avis ("bird").
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Wikipedia