Pavo is a constellation in the southern sky whose name is Latin for ‘peacock’ It first appeared on a 35-cm diameter celestial globe published in 1598 in Amsterdam. It contains NGC 6752, the third-brightest globular cluster in the sky. Six of the star systems in Pavo have been found to host planets.
About Pavo (constellation) in brief
Pavo is a constellation in the southern sky whose name is Latin for “peacock. It first appeared on a 35-cm diameter celestial globe published in 1598 in Amsterdam by Plancius and Jodocus Hondius. The constellation’s brightest member, Alpha Pavonis, is also known as Peacock and appears as a 1. 91-magnitude blue-white star, but is actually a spectroscopic binary. Six of the star systems in Pavo have been found to host planets, including HD 181433 with a super-earth, and HD 172555 with evidence of a major interplanetary collision in the past few thousand years. It contains NGC 6752, the third-brightest globular cluster in the sky, and the spiral galaxy NGC 6744, which closely resembles the Milky Way but is twice as large. Pavo displays an annual meteor shower known as the Delta Pavonids, whose radiant is near the star δ Pav. The constellations Pavo, Grus, Phoenix and Tucana are collectively called the “Southern Birds”. Pavo is bordered by the constellation Apus to the north, Apus. to the west, Araus and Araus to east, and Coverans to the south, northeast and northeast. The people of the Northern Territory in Australia saw the stars of Pavo and neighbouring stars of Araus as flying foxes, rather than the blue peacock known to the ancient Greeks, which they would have encountered in the East Indies.
The first depiction of this constellation in a celestial atlas was in German cartographer Johann Bayer’s Uranometria of 1603. It is uncertain whether the Dutch astronomers had the Greek mythos in mind when creating Pavo but, in keeping with other constellation introduced by Petrus Plancius through Pieter Dirkszoon Keyser and Frederick de Houtman, the new constellation likely referred to the green peacock, which the Greeks called Argus. The peacock and the “Argus” nomenclature are also prominent in a different myth, in which Io, a beautiful princess of Argos, was lusted after by Zeus. Zeus changed Io into a heifer to deceive his wife Hera and couple with her. As recounted in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, the death of Argus Panoptes also contains an explicit celestial reference: “Argus lay dead; so many eyes, so bright quenched, and all hundred shrouded in one night. Saturnia filled his tail with starry jewels”
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This page is based on the article Pavo (constellation) published in Wikipedia (as of Nov. 05, 2020) and was automatically summarized using artificial intelligence.
