Pisces ☉ Zodiac
“The Fishes” · Both (straddles the celestial equator) · best around November evenings
Real star positions and magnitudes (HYG database via D3-Celestial, BSD-3). Lines are the conventional stick figure; north is up.
The story
Two fish tied tail-to-tail by a cord — in myth, Aphrodite and her son escaping a monster by leaping into a river. Faint but easy to locate below the Great Square via its 'Circlet.' The vernal equinox — the point where the Sun crosses into the northern sky each March — currently sits in Pisces.
How to find it
Autumn: the Circlet of five faint stars sits just south of the Great Square of Pegasus.
✦ What lives inside it
- The Circlet asterism
- The vernal equinox point
- M74 spiral galaxy
The deep dive
Researched for the Atlas from Wikipedia — Pisces (constellation) (8,307 characters read) · updated Sep 20, 2026
01 Second dimmest zodiac constellation
Pisces covers an enormous stretch of sky yet offers almost nothing to the naked eye. Only two of its stars shine brighter than magnitude 4, making it the second dimmest constellation in the entire zodiac. In or near any major city, light pollution renders the constellation essentially invisible — the faint glow of even a suburban sky is enough to wash it out completely. Astronomers sometimes call this the paradox of Pisces: a constellation vast enough to contain the celestial equator's crossing with the ecliptic, yet one that vanishes at the first hint of artificial light. Visitors to genuinely dark sites will still find it a patience-testing target, since no single star jumps out to anchor the eye. Learning to trace its looping chain of faint stars — the two fish joined by a long cord meeting at the star Alrescha — is one of those quiet rewards that separates seasoned stargazers from casual ones.
02 Alrescha: the knot that ties two fish
Alpha Piscium carries the name Alrescha, meaning "the cord," which perfectly describes its role in the constellation's mythology: it marks the knot where the two cords connecting the fishes meet. At a distance of 309.8 light-years, it shines at magnitude 3.62 and belongs to spectral class A2, meaning it burns with a white to blue-white color. Alrescha is not a single point of light but a variable binary star — two stars in orbit around each other, whose changing geometry causes subtle brightness fluctuations over time. Its companion makes this one of the few naked-eye stars in Pisces with an added layer of physical complexity. Because Alrescha sits near the ecliptic, observers with telescopes can occasionally watch the Moon drift across or very close to it, a phenomenon called a lunar occultation — a reminder that the whole constellation sits along the highway that the Sun, Moon, and planets travel through the sky.
03 Van Maanen's Star: a dense neighbor Deeper
Tucked roughly 2 degrees south of Delta Piscium lies one of the most remarkable objects in this region of sky: Van Maanen's Star, the closest known solitary white dwarf to our Sun. It is far too faint to see with the naked eye, yet its physical properties are extraordinary. Its mass has been estimated at about 67 percent of the Sun's, yet it has only 1 percent of the Sun's radius — meaning matter is packed to a density that would make a teaspoon of the star weigh roughly as much as a small car. Its outer atmosphere registers approximately 6,110 K, which is considered relatively cool for a white dwarf. Because all white dwarfs slowly radiate away their stored heat over billions of years, that temperature acts as a kind of clock, suggesting an age of around 3 billion years. It moves across the sky at a proper motion of 2.978 arc-seconds per year — fast enough that its position shifts measurably on a human timescale. Historically, before the nature of white dwarfs was understood, astronomers originally classified it as an ordinary F-type star.
04 Eta Piscium: a star with a weak magnetic pulse Deeper
Eta Piscium, named Alpherg meaning "emptying," is the co-holder of the brightest title in Pisces alongside Alrescha, both at magnitude 3.62. At 349 light-years away it belongs to spectral class G7 IIIa, placing it in the yellow giant category. What makes Alpherg stand out in a stellar physics sense is its classification as a Gamma Cassiopeiae variable — a type of variable star associated with rapid rotation and the ejection of material from the star's equator into a surrounding disk. Alongside this, Alpherg has been found to possess a weak magnetic field, a detail that connects to the poorly understood processes driving variability in such stars. Gamma Cassiopeiae variables are still a subject of active study, and Alpherg provides a relatively nearby example of this puzzling behavior. For observers, magnitude 3.62 means it is visible to the naked eye from dark sites, though it offers no dramatic color to the eye — it requires a spectrograph to reveal its more interesting physics.
05 M74: a spiral galaxy almost face-on
At 30 million light-years away — a distance so large that the light now reaching your eye left M74 when mammals were just beginning to diversify after the dinosaur extinction — this loosely wound type Sc spiral galaxy is one of the finest face-on spirals visible to amateur telescopes in the Northern Hemisphere. Pierre Méchain, the French astronomer and collaborator of Charles Messier, discovered it in 1780. M74 is studded with clusters of young stars and glowing nebulae marking extensive ongoing star formation. In June 2003, amateur astronomer Robert Evans spotted a supernova in M74's outer regions; the star responsible was later identified as a red supergiant with a mass of 8 solar masses, which had ended its life in a type II-P supernova. M74 is the brightest member of the M74 Group of galaxies and is regarded by many observers as challenging in small telescopes due to its low surface brightness, but rewarding in darker skies with larger apertures.
06 3C 31: jets spanning millions of light-years Deeper
Among the less-celebrated wonders hiding in Pisces is 3C 31, an active galaxy and powerful radio source sitting 237 million light-years from Earth, with a redshift of 0.0173. At its center lurks a supermassive black hole whose energy output drives two opposing jets of plasma that extend several million light-years in either direction from the galaxy's core. To put that scale in perspective, those jets are longer than the distance between the Milky Way and the Andromeda Galaxy, making them rank among the largest coherent structures known in the universe. Radio telescopes — not optical ones — are the proper tool for studying 3C 31, since its defining feature is invisible to the human eye. Objects like 3C 31 are critical for understanding how supermassive black holes shape their surrounding environment, pumping energy into the intergalactic medium and influencing star formation across enormous volumes of space.
07 CL0024+17: a gravitational lens in the deep field Deeper
One of Pisces' most scientifically significant objects cannot be seen without a large telescope and a long exposure, yet it offers a window billions of years into the universe's past. CL0024+17 is a massive galaxy cluster located 3.6 billion light-years away, with a redshift of 0.4. Its combined mass is so enormous that it bends the light of a more distant galaxy behind it — a galaxy sitting at 5.7 billion light-years, with a redshift of 1.67 — creating arc-shaped images of that background galaxy around the cluster's edges. This effect, called gravitational lensing, was predicted by Einstein's general relativity and turns the cluster into a natural cosmic magnifying glass. The cluster itself is primarily composed of yellow elliptical and spiral galaxies. Studying the arcs lets astronomers probe the mass distribution of the cluster and examine properties of a galaxy far too faint and distant to image directly, making CL0024+17 a favourite target in studies of dark matter and early galaxy evolution.
08 Babylonian roots: swallow, goddess, and cord
Long before Greek astronomers drew two fishes in this part of the sky, Babylonian sky-watchers of the first millennium BC had already divided this region between distinct figures. Western Pisces corresponded to a constellation called Šinunutu, meaning "the great swallow," while the position of the northern fish was associated with Anunitum, "the Lady of the Heaven." The Babylonian Astronomical Diaries — a remarkable archive of systematic celestial observations kept over centuries — also referred to part of this region as DU.NU.NU, transliterated as Rikis-nu.mi, meaning "the fish cord or ribbon." That image of a connecting cord is striking: it appears independently in both Babylonian and Greco-Roman traditions, suggesting either a shared inheritance or a parallel recognition that the asterism's looping, linked shape invited the metaphor of something tied or bound. The constellation we see today is thus a cultural palimpsest, with layers of meaning accumulated from several ancient civilizations.
09 Aphrodite, Typhon, and an egg in the river
The Greeks attached at least two distinct mythological explanations to Pisces, both preserved by the Roman writer Hyginus. In the more famous version, Aphrodite and her son Eros fled the terrifying monster Typhon by leaping into the Euphrates River and transforming into fish — a story Hyginus cites from Diognetus Erythraeus in the Poeticon astronomicon. The Roman retelling by Ovid shifts the detail slightly: Venus and Cupid are carried to safety on the backs of two fish rather than becoming fish themselves. A second, stranger tale also comes from Hyginus: a mysterious egg rolled into the Euphrates, fish nudged it to the shore, doves incubated it, and Aphrodite herself hatched from it — after which she was identified with the Syrian Goddess. As a reward, the fish were immortalized in the sky. This egg story was also recorded independently by the Third Vatican Mythographer, suggesting it circulated widely in antiquity. The two traditions reflect how fluid and regionally varied Greek mythology actually was.
10 Hevelius splits Pisces into four parts
In 1690, the astronomer Johannes Hevelius offered an unusually detailed anatomical view of Pisces in his star atlas Firmamentum Sobiescianum, carving the constellation into four named subdivisions. He identified Piscis Boreus as the northern fish, Piscis Austrinus as the southern fish, and Linum Boreum and Linum Austrinum as the northern and southern cords respectively. Each subdivision was defined by a specific chain of stars. Hevelius's name Piscis Austrinus now causes mild confusion for modern students because it duplicates the name of a separate, officially recognized constellation — Piscis Austrinus, the Southern Fish, which Hevelius and Bode separately called Piscis Notius. In 1754, the botanist and author John Hill went a step further and proposed splitting off a southern zone of Pisces into an entirely new constellation called Testudo, the Turtle, built around the stars 24, 27, 30, 33, and 29 Piscium, with star 20 Psc serving as the turtle's head. Admiral Smyth acknowledged the proposal, but the wider astronomical community ignored it, and Testudo is now entirely obsolete.
11 Chinese astronomy: pigs, marshes, and sandals
Chinese sky culture carved up the stars of Pisces into images bearing no resemblance to fish. The asterism Wai-ping, meaning "Outer Enclosure," was visualized as a fence serving a dual practical purpose: keeping a pig farmer from tumbling into surrounding marshes, and keeping the pigs contained within their proper boundaries. This fence was traced through Alpha, Delta, Epsilon, Zeta, Mu, Nu, and Xi Piscium. The marshy ground itself was represented by four stars designated Phi Ceti, sitting just outside modern Pisces' boundaries. Meanwhile, the stars making up the northern fish of Pisces were incorporated into a different asterism altogether — the House of the Sandal, called Koui-siou. These varied associations highlight how human imagination projects entirely different narratives onto the same star patterns depending on cultural context, agricultural life, and the particular night sky concerns of each civilization. There is no single "correct" constellation — only the rich diversity of how humans have organized the heavens.
12 The March equinox lives here, for now
One of the most consequential points in the entire sky — the March equinox, also called the First Point of Aries — is currently located within Pisces, directly south of Omega Piscium. This is the spot where the ecliptic crosses the celestial equator, the zero-zero point from which astronomers measure right ascension across the whole sky. The Sun passes through this point around the March equinox each year, the moment when day and night are roughly equal in length across Earth. Its name, the First Point of Aries, is a historical artifact: when ancient Greek astronomers named it, precession had placed it in Aries. Over the roughly 2,000 years since, Earth's slowly wobbling axis has shifted the equinox westward into Pisces. It continues to drift in that direction, moving toward Aquarius — which is why some people speak of an "Age of Aquarius" that has not quite arrived. In time, measured in centuries, the equinox will cross that boundary.
13 Gamma Piscium and Epsilon Piscium: planet hosts Deeper
Pisces quietly harbors two confirmed or candidate exoplanet hosts among its named stars. Gamma Piscium, a G8 III giant 138 light-years away shining at magnitude 3.70, was found in 2021 to host an exoplanet — a relatively recent discovery that adds this aging giant star to the growing catalog of worlds beyond the solar system. Epsilon Piscium, 190 light-years distant and also a giant (class K0III) at magnitude 4.27, hosts a candidate exoplanet, meaning the evidence is suggestive but not yet at the level of formal confirmation. The presence of planets around giant stars like these is of particular interest to astronomers studying how planetary systems evolve after their host star leaves the main sequence and expands. Both stars are visible to the naked eye from dark sites, making them an unusual category: stars you can see without any equipment that are known to harbor other worlds.