Taurus: The Bull

Taurus only shows half an animal, and it is more recognizable for it. A V-shaped face charges out of the winter sky with one glaring orange eye, and just above its shoulder rides one of the most famous star clusters visible to the naked eye anywhere on Earth.

The bull's face is drawn by a cluster, not a handful of scattered points

Aldebaran, an orange giant, is the bull's glaring eye, and at magnitude 0.85 it is bright enough to pick out immediately even from a light-polluted sky. Elnath, a blue-white giant, marks one of the horn tips, giving the whole shape its charging, forward-leaning posture.

What makes Taurus's face distinctive is that it is not just two or three named stars, it is an entire cluster. The Hyades, the nearest open cluster to Earth, forms the actual V-shape of the bull's face, with Aldebaran sitting at one tip of the V even though Aldebaran itself is not a member of the cluster, just a foreground star that happens to line up with it.

The Pleiades ride on the bull's shoulder, and nearly every culture has named them

Above and to the side of the face sits the Pleiades, M45, the "Seven Sisters," a bright naked-eye star cluster that is one of the easiest deep-sky objects to find in the entire night sky. It looks like a tiny, tight dipper of stars to the unaided eye and resolves into far more stars through binoculars.

The Pleiades cluster is one of the most widely named star groups on Earth, independently recognized and named across cultures with no contact with one another: it appears in Greek myth as the sisters that give it its common name, in Japanese sky lore as Subaru, and in Aboriginal Australian traditions as well. Few objects in the sky have that kind of near-universal recognition. Separately, Taurus is also home to the Crab Nebula, M1, the expanding remnant of a supernova that was actually seen and recorded by observers here on Earth in the year 1054.

The myth is about a god in disguise, and a bull sent by a rival god

In Greek myth, Taurus is the bull that Zeus transformed himself into in order to carry off the princess Europa across the sea to Crete. Only the front half of the animal is drawn in the sky, as if the rest of the bull is submerged, rising out of the waves it swam across. The bull's face is the V of the Hyades, and its glaring eye is Aldebaran.

The Babylonians told a different story about the same stars: this was the Bull of Heaven, sent by the gods against the hero Gilgamesh. That story predates the Greek myth by a wide margin, and it is a reminder that this pattern of stars carried mythological weight long before the version most people know today.

The constellation Taurus and the zodiac sign Taurus are not the same thing

Worth stating clearly: the zodiac sign Taurus, used in horoscopes and birth charts, is a fixed slice of the tropical zodiac tied to the calendar. The constellation Taurus, the actual bull described above, is a specific region of real sky with its own IAU boundaries.

The same slow axial wobble that affects every zodiac constellation, precession, taking roughly 26,000 years to complete one full cycle, has shifted the Sun's actual position among these stars away from where it sat relative to the calendar when the zodiac's sign boundaries were first fixed. The sign did not change. It was always a separate system from the constellation, sharing a name and an ancient starting point rather than a current position. For the sign side, taurus-zodiac-sign covers what Taurus represents in the chart on this site.

Where and when to look

Taurus is a northern constellation, best seen in January, when it is high and easy to trace in the evening sky, with Orion rising right behind it as a helpful neighbor.

What this means for you tonight

Look for a small, tight cluster of stars that looks almost like a tiny dipper. That is the Pleiades. Drop your eyes down and to one side and you should find a looser V of stars with one noticeably orange point near its tip. That orange point is Aldebaran, and the V around it is the Hyades, the actual face of the bull. If your Sun sign or rising sign is Taurus, this charging animal is where the name originally came from, even though the sign itself tracks the calendar rather than the Sun's literal position among these particular stars today. For how a shape like this earns official constellation status in the first place, see what is a constellation, and for what Aldebaran's magnitude of 0.85 actually tells you next to Elnath's 1.65, see how star brightness works.