Constellation Profile - Fornax

We now look to the East of the constellation Sculptor and find one called Fornax.  Fornax seems to be more interesting than the other of Lacaille's constellations.  It has several bright stars and plenty of deep-sky objects.  It is nearly completely visible from Calgary as its declination ranges from 24°S - 39.5°S.  There are numerous ways to pick it out of our sky.  If you take Alpha Orionis (Betelgeuse) and make a path through the westernmost star of Orion's belt (Delta Orionis - Mintaka) it will take you right into the middle of Fornax.  It is a fair distance away from Mintaka though (~50°).  It can be estimated by stretching your pinky finger and thumb out on both hands and placing them together held at arm's length.  The sky chart below will help.

Star-hop to Fornax

In keeping with the theme of enlightenment laboratory equipment Lacaille represented these stars as a Furnace.  Fornax is the Latin word for furnace, oven or kiln.  Lacaille's original diagram is shown below.

Lacaille's Fornax

It is said that Lacaille named it in honour of his friend, the chemist Antoine Lavoisier.  This is obviously a propagating error on the internet as Lavoisier was barely a teenager when the constellation was named.  However, Johann Bode renamed Fornax to Apparatus Chemicus which was based on the heater use in Lavoisier's many experiments.  Bode's renaming did not hold up over history and we continue to use Fornax as the official name.  Bode's diagram is shown below.

Uranographia Fornax

It is visible from Calgary in the evening (10-11pm) in the southern sky around the beginning of December.  Use the Orion trick above to find it.  Telescope users may find a few things to look at.  NGC 1360 is a planetary nebula commonly known as the Robin's Egg Nebula.  It is a blue ellipsoid that, coincidentally, looks like a Robin's Egg.  I'd love to take a crack at finding it from the observatory one evening.

The Fornax Dwarf Galaxy is located just to the southwest of Beta Fornacis.  It is a satellite galaxy of our own Milky Way and is relatively nearby at just over 460,000 light years.  If you want to have fun with astroimaging try to see if you can find several of its 6 globular clusters.

Similar to Microscopium, Fornax is home to a cluster of galaxies about 62 million light years away.

Using my typical format for constellations I compiled this constellation into an image.  All my formatted images contain all the Bayer stars to scale.  It is actually quite a bit of work.

Fornax

 As of this writing (November 2, 2017) one of the largest asteroids is sitting right between Gamma 2 Fornacis and Omega Fornacis.  Its name is Pallas and it is about half a thousand kilometers in diameter.  Discovered very early in the 19th century it contains more than 7% of the entire mass of the asteroid belt.  This could be an intriguing target for those with the patience to scan the southern horizon in the cold, dark days of Winter.