Mensa (constellation)
- Swordfish
- Small water snake
- Octant
- Chameleon
- Flying Fish
Table Mountain is a constellation of the southern sky. The German name is fairly uncommon nowadays. The constellation is usually called Mensa, after coming from the Latin technical term.
Description
Mensa is a completely inconspicuous constellation near the south celestial pole. It contains the only among the 88 recognized constellations no star that is brighter than the fifth magnitude.
North of Mensa is the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC ), a smaller companion galaxy of our Milky Way.
History
The name of the constellation is derived from the French astronomer Lacaille, who observed from 1751 to 1753 from the Cape of Good Hope from the southern sky. He called the faint group of stars to commemorate the often shrouded by clouds of Table Mountain behind Cape Mons Mensa, and took them up in his work Coelum australe stelliferum.
Celestial objects
Stars
Because of the southern location, the stars have no Flamsteed designation.
α Mensae, the brightest star in the cafeteria, only has an apparent magnitude of 5.08 m. At night the sky is he appears as a faint star. It is a yellowish star of spectral type G5 V with similar physical characteristics, such as our sun. The star is 33 light years away and gives an impression of how our own solar system would look like from this distance.
Misty object
Part of the Large Magellanic Cloud (English: Large Magellanic Cloud ( LMC) ) is located in the cafeteria, the other part in the swordfish.
The Large Magellanic Cloud is the brightest and most nebulous object in the night sky. It has an area of 5 times 6 °. It is a smaller companion galaxy of our Milky Way 180,000 light years away. There are several star clusters and nebulae, which can already be observed with a small telescope in her.
In the cafeteria is located beyond the faint globular cluster NGC 1841.