There are three constellations named for dogs, but what about cats in the sky? There is astrocat Felicette who went into space and returned safely to Earth, but also constellations of big cats and a pawprint 50 light years across.

Cats in the Sky

This isn't a new article, but I have altered the links so that people without Pinterest accounts can see the images.

The Russians sent Laika the dog into space, but the French space program sent Félicette, a Parisian street cat. (Her name meant happy or lucky.) Poor Laika died early in the mission, but Félicette returned safely to Earth. However she was misnamed because she was then euthanized in order to study the effects of microgravity.

Animals sent into space are sometimes described as "brave" and "having sacrificed". But make no mistake - they didn't sacrifice, they were sacrificed.

The now-obsolete constellation Felis did make it into a few sky atlases, including Johann Bode's Uranographia. But I have often wondered if the artist had ever seen a cat! To me there's something slightly guinea piggish about it.

This Felis in Alexander Jamieson's atlas is more persuasive.

NASA made a cute April Fool several years ago in the form of a video called Mystifying Space Cats Photo-Bomb Hubble Imagery. It's a short "documentary" about a man whose job in image enhancement of Hubble photos is to remove the cats photobombing the astronomy photos.

Although the only domestic cat constellation is no longer in use, there are bigger cats in the sky.

Leo is a Zodiac constellation and its stars have represented a lion for over four thousand years. Leo contains one of the brightest stars in the sky and one of the dimmest, as well as a selection of spiral galaxies loved by amateur astronomers. And why isn't Regulus the star of summer anymore?

Leo the Lion