Vulpecula: The Fox

Vulpecula started life with a longer, stranger name than the one it has now. Hevelius originally called it Vulpecula cum Ansere, the little fox with the goose, and while the goose eventually dropped off the official name, its memory survives in the constellation's one named star.

A fox Hevelius invented, no goose required

Vulpecula was published by Johannes Hevelius in 1687 as one of his batch of new constellations, filling in a faint patch of the summer Milky Way that no ancient culture had claimed with a shape of its own. There is no classical myth attached to it. That puts Vulpecula in the same category as several other faint constellations on this map, ones whose real story is a specific mapmaker filling a specific gap rather than a god or hero doing anything at all.

A fox and a goose is a strange enough pairing that it is worth pausing on. Hevelius was not working from any inherited story when he drew this one. He was looking at unclaimed stars and reaching for an image that fit the space available, and a small predator carrying off a bird was apparently what came to mind.

The one named star still remembers the goose

Vulpecula's brightest star is Anser, formally Alpha Vulpeculae, a red giant at magnitude 4.44. Anser means "the goose," a small leftover from the constellation's original full name. It is also the only star in Vulpecula bright enough to have earned a proper name rather than just a catalog designation, which tells you plainly how faint the rest of this constellation runs. Every other star here is known only by its catalog number, not because it is uninteresting, but because it never got bright enough for anyone to bother.

A nebula shaped like its name, and a coathanger that is not really there

Vulpecula's best-known deep-sky object is M27, the Dumbbell Nebula, a large, bright planetary nebula, the glowing shell of gas a dying star throws off as it collapses toward its final stage. It earns its nickname honestly: through a telescope, it really does show two lobes with a pinched waist between them.

Nearby sits the Coathanger, also cataloged as Brocchi's Cluster, a chance line of stars that happens to form a shape almost identical to a wire coathanger. "Chance" is the important word. The stars in the Coathanger are not physically bound together the way a real star cluster's members are; they simply happen to sit along the same line of sight from Earth, close enough in the sky to read as one pattern even though they are not one object.

The site of a genuine astronomical first

In 1967, Vulpecula's patch of sky was where the very first radio pulsar was discovered. It is a quiet, striking fact for such a dim, myth-free constellation to hold: a genuine first in the history of astronomy, sitting in a fox nobody had bothered to name before Hevelius came along.

There is something fitting about that. Vulpecula never had a hero or a monster to make it memorable on its own terms. Instead it earned its place in the history books the same way a lot of modern astronomy works, by being wherever the instruments happened to be pointed when something genuinely new showed up.

What this means for you tonight

Vulpecula is a northern constellation, best placed for viewing in September, sitting in the same stretch of summer Milky Way that runs through Cygnus. Find Cygnus first on the sky map, then look nearby for Vulpecula's much fainter stars rather than trying to pick them out cold.

The Dumbbell Nebula and the Coathanger both reward binoculars far more than the naked eye, so if you are hunting them tonight, bring something with more light-gathering power than your own eyes alone. For the mechanics of why some constellations carry ancient names and others, like Vulpecula, were assigned by a working 17th-century astronomer with a blank patch of sky to fill, see what is a constellation. Leo Minor and Lynx are two more of Hevelius's modern, myth-free inventions if this kind of origin story interests you, and how star brightness works explains why Anser at magnitude 4.44 is the brightest thing Vulpecula has to offer.