Camelopardalis
“The Giraffe” · Northern · best around February evenings
Real star positions and magnitudes (HYG database via D3-Celestial, BSD-3). Lines are the conventional stick figure; north is up.
The story
A large but ghost-faint 17th-century constellation filling the space between the pole and Perseus — its name is the Greek 'camel-leopard', the giraffe. A test of dark skies; binoculars reveal Kemble's Cascade, a chance chain of 20 stars.
How to find it
The 'empty' region between Polaris, Capella and Perseus.
✦ What lives inside it
- Kemble's Cascade
- NGC 2403 galaxy
The deep dive
Researched for the Atlas from Wikipedia — Camelopardalis (6,130 characters read) · updated Sep 20, 2026
01 A constellation born on a globe, not the sky
Camelopardalis owes its existence entirely to the early seventeenth century, making it a relative newcomer among the 88 modern constellations. Petrus Plancius created it in 1613, and it made its debut not in a star atlas but on a globe produced by the engraver Pieter van den Keere. One year later, Jakob Bartsch included it in his published atlas, spreading the figure to a wider audience of astronomers and navigators. Johannes Hevelius later depicted it in his own influential works, and his treatment was so widely cited that scholars of the era referred to it as Camelopardali Hevelii, sometimes shortened to Camelopard. Hevel. The constellation never appears in Ptolemy's Almagest, the classical catalogue that anchored Western star-lore for fourteen centuries, which tells us the northern polar region it occupies was simply not codified by ancient Mediterranean astronomers into a recognizable figure of its own.
02 The name that describes an impossible animal
The word camelopardalis reached English in 1785, borrowed from Latin, which itself was a transliteration of the Greek kamelopardalis. Greek speakers had coined a wonderfully descriptive compound: kamelos, meaning camel, joined to pardalis, meaning leopard. Put them together and you get an animal with a camel's long neck and a leopard's spots — a giraffe, described by people who had rarely or never seen one. Earlier astronomers sometimes listed the constellation under the alternative Latin forms Camelopardalus or Camelopardus, but the International Astronomical Union settled on Camelopardalis, and that is also the genitive form suffixed to the names of its brighter stars, as in Alpha Camelopardalis. The etymology is a small reminder that ancient and early-modern Europeans encountered the giraffe as a creature almost mythological in its strangeness, strange enough to need two familiar beasts to describe it.
03 A brief life for the Flying Squirrel Deeper
The boundaries of Camelopardalis have not always been what they are today. In 1810, the American astronomer William Croswell carved a portion of the constellation away and declared it a new figure: Sciurus Volans, the Flying Squirrel. It was an ambitious act of celestial cartography, but later mapmakers simply ignored the proposal, and Sciurus Volans vanished without ever achieving the acceptance needed to survive into the modern era. The episode is a useful reminder that the 88 constellations recognized today were not inevitable; the sky's division into named regions was a long negotiation among astronomers, globe-makers, and atlas publishers, with many proposed figures falling away for lack of adoption. Camelopardalis itself survived that process largely because Hevelius championed it, giving it the institutional weight that Croswell's squirrel never acquired.
04 China's circumpolar stars and a forbidden palace
While European astronomers left the far northern sky largely uncharted until the seventeenth century, Chinese astronomy had long organized the circumpolar region into a rich symbolic geography. The stars that Western astronomers now group under Camelopardalis fall within what Chinese tradition called the Purple Forbidden Enclosure, rendered in Chinese as 紫微垣 and romanized as Zǐ Wēi Yuán. This was one of three great celestial enclosures in the Chinese system and was conceived as the heavenly counterpart of the imperial palace — a region of sky surrounding the celestial pole, off-limits and sacred, just as the Forbidden City on Earth was closed to ordinary people. The fact that the same patch of sky carried such different meanings in different traditions — bare and unnamed in the Greek tradition, richly symbolic in the Chinese — illustrates how much cultural priorities shape the way humans carve up the heavens.
05 Stars so bright yet so extremely far away Deeper
Despite covering the 18th-largest area of sky, Camelopardalis contains only four stars brighter than magnitude 5.0, and none reaches fourth magnitude from below. That faintness conceals some remarkable distances. Alpha Camelopardalis, a blue-hued supergiant of magnitude 4.3, lies over 6,000 light-years from Earth — making it one of the most distant stars a person can see without any optical aid at all. At 6,000 light-years, the light reaching your eye tonight left that star roughly when the Bronze Age was beginning in parts of Europe. The constellation's brightest star, Beta Camelopardalis, at magnitude 4.03, is a far closer yellow-hued supergiant about 1,000 light-years away. Its companion, visible in a telescope at magnitude 8.6, means Beta Cam is a genuine double star. CS Camelopardalis, the second-brightest star at magnitude 4.21, carries neither a Bayer nor a Flamsteed designation and is slightly variable, an unusual combination of anonymity and intrinsic interest.
06 Z Cam and the variables worth watching Deeper
Camelopardalis punches above its weight when it comes to variable stars. Z Camelopardalis is the defining example — the prototype — of an entire class of cataclysmic variable stars named after it, the Z Camelopardalis variables. It swings between visibility in an amateur telescope and extreme faintness, making it a regular target in observing programs coordinated by the American Association of Variable Star Observers. The constellation also contains U Camelopardalis, VZ Camelopardalis, and three Mira-type long-period variables: T, X, and R Camelopardalis. RU Camelopardalis stands apart as one of the brighter Type II Cepheids visible in the night sky — these are pulsating stars that serve as distance indicators and are chemically older than the more famous Type I Cepheids. In 2011, a supernova was discovered within the constellation's borders, adding a transient event to its roster of intrinsically interesting stellar phenomena.
07 Kemble's Cascade and the cluster it points toward
One of the constellation's most rewarding binocular sights is Kemble's Cascade, an asterism — a striking but unofficial star pattern — that appears as a chain of stars roughly 2.5 degrees long running parallel to the Milky Way and pointing toward Cassiopeia. The cascade leads the eye naturally to NGC 1502, an open star cluster of magnitude 6.9 sitting about 3,000 light-years away. NGC 1502 contains around 45 bright members and is graced at its center by a double star of magnitude 7.0, giving small telescopes two rewarding targets in one field of view. Just 1.4 degrees to the south lies NGC 1501, a planetary nebula, so a slow sweep of this area with a telescope offers an open cluster, a central double star, a beautiful star chain, and a planetary nebula within a compact region of sky. Stock 23, also called Pazmino's Cluster, lies nearby on the border with Cassiopeia and is so sparse that some observers classify it more as an asterism than a true gravitationally bound cluster.
08 A galaxy group and a starburst dwarf next door Deeper
Because Camelopardalis faces away from the plane of the Milky Way, the constellation's lines of sight look outward into the broader universe with relatively little obstruction from our own galaxy's dust and star fields. NGC 2403, discovered by William Herschel while working in England in the eighteenth century, belongs to the M81 group of galaxies and sits approximately 12 million light-years away, with a measured redshift of 0.00043. Classified as intermediate between elliptical and spiral, it shows faint arms alongside a large central bulge, and at integrated magnitude 8.0 it spans about 0.25 degrees — large enough to reward a small telescope. Not far away in the same region of sky, the dwarf irregular galaxy NGC 1569 is a starburst galaxy at magnitude 11.9 and roughly 11 million light-years distant, its intense star-formation activity making it scientifically interesting despite its faintness. IC 342 is one of the two brightest galaxies in the IC 342/Maffei Group, another nearby galaxy group made accessible by the constellation's high galactic latitude.
09 Black-hole jets carving cavities 600,000 light-years wide Deeper
Among the most extreme objects in Camelopardalis is the galaxy cluster MS0735.6+7421, located 2.6 billion light-years away with a redshift of 0.216. What makes it scientifically remarkable is its intracluster medium — the hot gas that fills the space between galaxies in the cluster — which emits X-rays at an exceptionally high rate. The cluster's central supermassive black hole drives jets of matter outward with enough energy to excavate two enormous cavities in that intracluster gas, each measuring 600,000 light-years in diameter. For scale, the entire Milky Way galaxy spans roughly 100,000 light-years, so each cavity is six times the width of our home galaxy. MS0735.6+7421 is described as one of the largest and most distant known examples of this jet-carved-cavity phenomenon, making it a key reference point for understanding how supermassive black holes can reshape the environments of entire galaxy clusters over cosmic time.
10 Tombaugh 5 and a cluster of faint stellar multitudes
Tombaugh 5 is an open cluster in Camelopardalis with an overall magnitude of 8.4, lying 5,800 light-years from Earth. Its classification tells observers exactly what to expect: Shapley class c and Trumpler class III 1 r together indicate a cluster that is irregularly shaped, loosely arranged, and detached from the surrounding star field, yet showing no central concentration whatsoever. It contains more than 100 stars, but most of them shine between 15th and 16th magnitude, meaning you will need a substantial telescope to resolve individual members. The narrow range of stellar brightnesses is itself scientifically useful, because it suggests the cluster's stars formed at similar times from similar material. NGC 2655, a large lenticular galaxy of visual magnitude 10.1, and the conspicuously warped barred spiral starburst galaxy NGC 2146 at 11th magnitude round out a constellation that, despite its faint naked-eye stars, offers a deep-sky inventory that rewards systematic telescopic exploration.
11 Looking toward the universe's earliest light Deeper
At the extreme end of what Camelopardalis contains is MACS0647-JD, listed in the article as one of the possible candidates for the farthest known galaxies in the universe, carrying a redshift of z equals 10.7. A redshift that large places the object in the very early universe, when the cosmos was a small fraction of its current age. The qualifier "possible candidates" is important: extremely high-redshift galaxy identifications depend on photometric redshift estimates and can be revised as better data arrive, so the article's careful language reflects genuine scientific uncertainty. If confirmed, an object at z equals 10.7 would be seen as it existed when the universe was only a few hundred million years old. That such a candidate sits within the boundaries of a constellation introduced in 1613, in a region once left blank by ancient astronomers, is a striking illustration of how the same patch of sky that seemed empty to the naked eye has become one of the deepest windows humanity possesses into cosmic history.