Lynx
“The Lynx” · Northern · best around March evenings
Real star positions and magnitudes (HYG database via D3-Celestial, BSD-3). Lines are the conventional stick figure; north is up.
The story
Hevelius named it honestly: you need a lynx's eyes to see it. A long dim chain filling the gap between Ursa Major and Auriga, its best object the 'Intergalactic Wanderer' — a globular cluster flung to the galaxy's far suburbs.
How to find it
The faint diagonal between the Dipper's bowl and Capella.
✦ What lives inside it
- NGC 2419, the Intergalactic Wanderer
The deep dive
Researched for the Atlas from Wikipedia — Lynx (constellation) (13,269 characters read) · updated Sep 20, 2026
01 Why Hevelius Named It After a Predator
When Johannes Hevelius stitched Lynx together in 1687, he was not thinking of the animal's grace or ferocity — he was thinking of its legendary eyesight. The constellation is so faint that he openly challenged future stargazers, declaring that only the lynx-eyed would ever be able to pick it out. He assembled 19 faint stars from a region between Ursa Major and Auriga that had previously belonged to the obsolete constellation Jordanus Fluvius, a figure that had already fallen out of fashion. Hevelius even entertained a second name — Tigris, the Tiger — listing it in his catalog, but his atlas kept Lynx as the official title. English astronomer John Flamsteed endorsed the figure in his own catalog published in 1712 and carried it into his atlas, cementing its place on the sky. The 19th-century amateur historian Richard Hinckley Allen noted wryly that the constellation's chief stars might just as well have completed a fourth pair of feet for the Great Bear next door — an indication of how loosely this region of sky had always been treated.
02 A Giant Star Running on Empty
Alpha Lyncis, the constellation's brightest star at apparent magnitude 3.14, is a vivid illustration of stellar old age. Classified as an orange giant of spectral type K7III, it sits 203 light-years from Earth and carries roughly twice the Sun's mass — yet that mass has led to its current dramatic state. Having exhausted the hydrogen fuel at its core, the star has evolved away from the main sequence and swollen to about 55 times the Sun's radius. Placed at the center of our own Solar System, it would engulf a volume extending well beyond Mercury. Its luminosity has climbed to roughly 673 times that of the Sun, even as its surface has cooled to just 3,880 K, giving it that warm orange hue. The only named star in the constellation is Alsciaukat, also known as 31 Lyncis, meaning thorn in Arabic. Sitting 380 light-years away, it too is an evolved giant of about twice the Sun's mass, now stretched to somewhere between 59 and 75 solar radii and radiating 740 times the Sun's luminosity. Alsciaukat also gently pulsates, varying by 0.05 magnitude over cycles of 25 to 30 days.
03 Triple and Double Stars Worth Your Eyepiece Deeper
Lynx rewards patient telescope users with an unusual concentration of multiple star systems. The second brightest star, 38 Lyncis at magnitude 3.8, splits through a moderate telescope into a blue-white primary of magnitude 3.9 and a companion that observers have described variously as lilac and blue-white at magnitude 6.1 — the color disagreement itself hints at the subjective art of stellar tinting. The pair 15 Lyncis separates into two yellowish stars of magnitudes 4.7 and 5.8 only 0.9 arcseconds apart, a challenging split. They are a gravitationally bound pair — a yellow giant of spectral type G8III weighing about 4.01 solar masses paired with a yellow-white main sequence star of type F8V at 3.73 solar masses — completing one mutual orbit every 262 years at a distance of 178 light-years. Then there is 12 Lyncis, a true triple: a combined magnitude of 4.87 that the eyepiece resolves into components of magnitudes 5.4 and 6.0 separated by 1.8 arcseconds, plus a yellow companion of magnitude 7.2 at 8.6 arcseconds. The inner pair's orbital period is poorly known, estimated somewhere between 700 and 900 years, and the whole system lies 210 light-years away.
04 The Pulsing Red Supergiant Y Lyncis Deeper
Y Lyncis is one of the more scientifically interesting variable stars accessible to amateur astronomers. It swings between magnitudes 6.2 and 8.9 — a brightness change of more than six-fold — making it trackable with binoculars at its peak and requiring a telescope near minimum. What makes Y Lyncis particularly compelling is that its variability is not simple: two distinct periodicities are at work simultaneously. A shorter cycle of 110 days is driven by actual pulsations of the star's outer layers. A much longer cycle of 1,400 days may reflect either the star's rotation or regular oscillations in its convective envelope — astronomers have not yet settled the question. The star itself is enormous: a red supergiant with an estimated diameter around 580 times that of the Sun. Placed in our Solar System, it would extend well past Jupiter's orbit. Despite this immensity, Y Lyncis carries only about 1.5 to 2 solar masses, reflecting how dramatically a massive star can expand late in life, and it shines with a luminosity around 25,000 times that of the Sun. Two other stars, 1 Lyncis and UX Lyncis, are red giants that similarly show complex semiregular variability.
05 The Intergalactic Wanderer's True Identity
NGC 2419 earned its dramatic nickname — the Intergalactic Wanderer — from the early assumption that it lay entirely outside the Milky Way. It does not, but the truth is nearly as remarkable. At a distance of between 275,000 and 300,000 light-years from Earth, it is one of the most remote globular clusters known to belong to our galaxy, sitting roughly as far from the galactic center as the Magellanic Clouds lie from us. Its orbit around the Milky Way is believed to be highly elliptical, meaning it spends most of its time in the deep galactic outskirts. With an apparent magnitude of +9.06 and a Shapley class VII designation, it is moderately concentrated toward its center — not among the densest clusters, but bright enough to detect with modest equipment. American astronomer Carl Lampland made the identification, originally mistaking the object for a star before recognizing its true nature. Because of its extreme isolation, NGC 2419 has been used to test gravitational theories: its behavior at such distances from the galactic mass offers a lever arm that closer clusters cannot provide.
06 NGC 2770 and a Supernova Factory Deeper
Roughly 88 million light-years away, the spiral galaxy NGC 2770 — classified as type SASc — has produced three Type Ib supernovae in recent memory: SN 1999eh, SN 2007uy, and SN 2008D. That rate of core-collapse explosions in a single galaxy over such a short window is statistically remarkable, and astronomers have suggested that gravitational interactions with a suspected companion galaxy may have generated the exceptionally massive stars responsible. SN 2008D became scientifically famous for a specific reason: it was the first supernova ever caught by the X-rays it produced in the very earliest moments of its collapse, rather than being spotted later by the optical light that typically flags such events. That early X-ray detection allowed the first moments of a stellar outburst to be observed directly. Nearby, the galaxy UGC 4904 provided its own drama. On 20 October 2004, Japanese amateur astronomer Kōichi Itagaki observed what turned out to be a supernova impostor — an eruptive event whose spectrum revealed that the star had shed massive amounts of material over just two years, transforming from a luminous blue variable into a Wolf-Rayet star before finally detonating as hypernova SN 2006jc on October 11, 2006.
07 A Quasar Weighed by Warped Spacetime Deeper
APM 08279+5255 is one of the most extreme objects in the observable universe, and gravitational lensing is central to how we study it. Discovered in 1998, it is a broad absorption line quasar initially regarded as the most luminous object yet found. Its light travels across a cosmological redshift of 3.911 — meaning we see it as it existed when the universe was a small fraction of its current age — and along the way it passes through a foreground galaxy whose gravity bends, magnifies, and splits it into multiple images, effectively giving astronomers a natural telescope boost. The underlying source appears to be a giant elliptical galaxy harboring a supermassive black hole estimated at around 23 billion times the mass of the Sun, with an accretion disk stretching an extraordinary 3,600 light-years in diameter. The system also contains large regions of hot dust, molecular gas, and zones of intense starburst activity. While studying this quasar in 2008, astronomers using ESA's XMM-Newton observatory and the Large Binocular Telescope in Arizona discovered the massive galaxy cluster 2XMM J083026+524133 along the same line of sight.
08 The Lynx Arc: A Window Into Early Star Birth
Even farther out than the Lynx Supercluster lies the Lynx Arc, located roughly 12 billion light-years away at a redshift of 3.357. It is visible at all only because a closer galaxy cluster acts as a gravitational lens, magnifying and distorting its light into an arc we can detect. What the Arc reveals is a compact region packed with around a million extremely hot, young blue stars. Their surface temperatures range from 80,000 to 100,000 K — twice as hot as comparable massive stars found in the Milky Way today. This extraordinary heat reflects the conditions of the early universe, when the first generations of stars formed from gas that had not yet been enriched by the metals forged in previous stellar generations. The Arc is described as representing the era of furious firestorms of star birth that were far more common in the young cosmos than they are now. Without gravitational lensing it would be essentially invisible, making it a striking example of how cosmic geometry can function as a scientific instrument, granting access to objects and epochs that would otherwise be forever beyond reach.
09 Meteor Showers With Ancient Witnesses
Lynx is the radiant point for two minor meteor showers with notably different histories. The September Lyncids appear around September 6 and are unremarkable by modern standards, but historical records tell a different story. Chinese observers documented them as significantly more prominent displays in 1037 and 1063, and Korean astronomers recorded the shower in 1560 — suggesting the stream was once richer, or that Earth passed through a denser part of it in those centuries. The Alpha Lyncids run from December 10 through January 3 and have a more recent discovery story: British astronomer Malcolm Currie identified them in 1971. Neither shower ranks among the major annual events, but their historical depth illustrates how meteor astronomy predates the telescope by centuries and how cross-cultural records — Chinese, Korean, and later European — together build a picture of how particle streams evolve over time as they spread and thin through the inner Solar System.
10 Exoplanets Found Two Different Ways Deeper
Lynx contains six confirmed planetary systems, and the contrast between how they were found illuminates the two dominant exoplanet detection techniques of the early 21st century. The systems around 6 Lyncis and HD 75898 were identified by the Doppler method, which detects the subtle back-and-forth wobble a planet induces in its host star's spectral lines. The planet orbiting 6 Lyncis — an orange subgiant that spent most of its life as an A- or F-type star — has a minimum mass of 2.4 Jupiter masses and takes 899 days to complete one orbit. HD 75898, a yellow G0V star estimated at 3.8 billion years old that has only just begun cooling off the main sequence, hosts a planet at least 2.51 Jupiter masses in a 418-day orbit; a separate acceleration of the system's center of mass hints at a third, more distant companion at least as large as Jupiter. The four remaining systems — XO-2, XO-4, XO-5, and WASP-13 — were found by the transit method, watching for the slight dimming as a planet crosses the face of its star. Three were detected by the XO Telescope in Hawaii. Several host hot Jupiters completing orbits in just 2.6 to 4.35 days, crowding remarkably close to their parent stars.
11 How Large Is Lynx, Really
Lynx occupies 545.4 square degrees of sky — about 1.322 percent of the entire celestial sphere — which places it 28th in size among the 88 recognized constellations. That ranking puts it ahead of several far more famous figures, including Gemini, even though Lynx is considerably harder to see. Its borders, formalized by Belgian astronomer Eugène Delporte in 1930, are defined by a polygon of 20 segments. Within those borders, there are 97 stars brighter than or equal to apparent magnitude 6.5, which represents the rough limit of naked-eye visibility under a dark sky. Francis Baily gave only a single star a Bayer designation — Alpha Lyncis — while Flamsteed numbered 44 stars, though several of those actually cross the boundary into Ursa Major. In the other direction, the star now catalogued as 10 Ursae Majoris was originally in Ursa Major but became part of Lynx when Delporte drew the official boundaries. Stars 37, 39, 41, and 44 Lyncis made the reverse journey, absorbed into Ursa Major when the lines were settled. These border adjustments are a reminder that constellation membership is an administrative convention, not a physical relationship.