BellaOnline Forums Education Astronomy Boötes - the Herdsman *new*

Here is a substantially new article that replaces a much older one. It's been updated, broken links repaired, and contains some new information.


This ancient constellation contains black holes as massive as a billion Suns, extrasolar planets and has acquired a meteor shower from an extinct neighbor. Its brightest star, a red giant 25 times the diameter of the Sun, is a sign that spring is here.

Boötes - the Herdsman

Here is Boötes from the early 19th century Urania's Mirror.

You can see that he's hold the leashes of his hunting dogs, the constellation Canes Ventatici invented by Johannes Hevelius. Above his head is the Quadrans Muralis, representing an obsolete astronomical instrument. The Quadrantid meteor shower, which is in Boötes now, took its name from this now-obsolete constellation.

Some people wondered about the neighboring constellation to Boötes that looks like Cousin Itt from the Addams Family.

Here is Cousin Itt and the constellation is Coma Berenices (Berenice's Hair).

A dazzling queen of ancient Egypt was the inspiration for the constellation Coma Berenices. It's small and dim, but contains the Galactic North Pole and multitudes of galaxies.

Coma Berenices - Berenice's Hair

The galaxy catalogued as NGC 5548 is located about 245 million light years away in Boötes. It's a Seyfert galaxy, i.e., an active galaxy powered by a supermassive black hole at its heart.

Photo credit: ESA/Hubble and NASA. Acknowledgement: Davide de Martin.

The Boötes Void has a diameter of about 300 million light years, and the center of the void is about 700 million light years from us.The map is a plot of all the galaxies brighter than magnitude 17 in this part of the sky. The void contains very few galaxies, although there are a lot of foreground galaxies between us and the void.

Credits: Richard Powell, Atlas of the Universe