Volans
“The Flying Fish” · Southern · 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
The navigators' flying fish, gliding beside the ship's keel in far southern skies.
How to find it
Between Carina and the LMC.
✦ What lives inside it
The deep dive
Researched for the Atlas from Wikipedia — Volans (3,076 characters read) · updated Sep 20, 2026
01 Born from a single voyage of discovery
Volans did not grow slowly from centuries of stargazing tradition. It was invented in a burst of cartographic ambition tied to one specific Dutch expedition. The navigators Pieter Dirkszoon Keyser and Frederick de Houtman systematically catalogued southern skies during their late-16th-century voyages, and their observations fed directly into the hands of globe-maker Petrus Plancius. The result was a set of twelve entirely new constellations, Volans among them, which appeared together on a 35-centimetre diameter celestial globe published in Amsterdam in 1597 or 1598. Plancius collaborated with the engraver Jodocus Hondius on that globe, and the flying fish made its debut there under the Dutch name Vliegendenvis. Within five years Johann Bayer had absorbed it into his landmark star atlas Uranometria of 1603, giving the figure the Latin name Piscis Volans and spreading it to a European scholarly audience far larger than any single globe could reach.
02 How a long name became one word
For more than two centuries the constellation carried the two-word Latin label Piscis Volans, meaning the flying fish. The campaign to shorten it came from an unlikely source: John Herschel, who in 1844 proposed trimming the name to simply Volans. Herschel justified the change by pointing out that Nicolas-Louis de Lacaille himself had occasionally abbreviated his own constellation names to a single word, setting a respectable precedent. The argument was persuasive enough that the shortened form was universally adopted, making Volans one of the cleaner names among the modern 88 constellations. Lacaille's influence on the constellation goes further: it was he who, in 1756, assigned Bayer Greek-letter designations to twelve of its stars, labelling them Alpha through Kappa, though in a quirk of that numbering he applied the labels Gamma and Kappa to two stars each, a small irregularity that reflects the informal nature of early southern-sky cataloguing.
03 A fish that flies alongside a famous ship
The image chosen for this patch of sky is not a random creature. Early celestial mapmakers placed Volans in deliberate narrative company: on old star charts the flying fish was depicted accompanying Argo Navis, the great ship of Jason and the Argonauts that once sprawled across the southern sky before being subdivided into smaller constellations. The flying fish skims alongside that vessel as a kind of atmospheric detail, a reminder that historical constellation-makers thought of the sky as a scene rather than just a catalogue. Adding drama, the neighbouring constellation Dorado, the dolphinfish or swordfish, was portrayed as a predator chasing Volans. That predator-prey relationship between two adjacent southern constellations gives the region a coherent visual story that pure star patterns alone could never suggest, rooting both figures in the tropical ocean world that Dutch sailors were navigating for the first time when these constellations were conceived.
04 The double stars a small telescope can split
Two double stars in Volans reward anyone with even a modest telescope. Gamma Volantis is the more striking pair: its two components shine at magnitudes 3.8 and 5.6, a comfortable brightness difference that makes the split satisfying at low power, and the brighter component is easily visible to the unaided eye. Epsilon Volantis offers a greater contrast challenge, with magnitudes of 4.4 and 7.3, meaning the fainter companion is roughly thirteen times dimmer than its partner in apparent brightness. Both systems were noted in the article specifically as observable with a small telescope rather than demanding large aperture, making them accessible targets for backyard observers at southern latitudes or during southern-hemisphere visits. The constellation's relatively sparse bright-star field means these doubles stand out as genuine highlights for visual observers who have tracked Volans down in the sky.
05 A sunlike star with a world of its own Deeper
Buried in the unremarkable star field of Volans is HD 76700, a star described as sunlike and confirmed to host a planet. It sits approximately 195 light-years from Earth, a distance that places it well beyond any prospect of near-future exploration but close enough to have been resolved as an individual stellar system rather than a statistical abstraction. The discovery adds Volans to the growing list of constellations that contain confirmed exoplanetary systems, a category that barely existed as a concept when Plancius first sketched the flying fish onto his 1597 globe. No further details about the planet's mass, period, or type appear in the source material, so HD 76700 remains a tantalising data point rather than a fully characterised world, illustrating how exoplanet science frequently moves from detection toward characterisation over years or decades of follow-up observation.
06 The Lindsay-Shapley ring and its violent origin Deeper
The most visually dramatic deep-sky object in Volans is the Lindsay-Shapley ring, catalogued as AM 0644-741, a ring galaxy located 300 million light-years from Earth. Discovered in 1960 near the direction of the Large Magellanic Cloud, it was named for its discoverers. Its extraordinary appearance results from a galactic collision that occurred many millions of years ago: when a smaller galaxy plunged through the progenitor, it triggered an outward-moving shock wave that compressed gas and dust into a ring where new stars ignited. Those newborn stars are hot and blue, giving the ring its striking colour, while the yellow core is an amalgamation of the original galaxies' central bulges. The blue ring itself spans 150,000 light-years in diameter, comparable in scale to the entire Milky Way disc. The process closely mirrors what produced the famous Cartwheel Galaxy in Sculptor, making the Lindsay-Shapley ring a second natural laboratory for studying collision-driven star formation.
07 NGC 2442 and the intermediate spiral next door Deeper
A second significant galaxy within Volans is NGC 2442, classified as an intermediate-spiral galaxy, meaning it sits morphologically between a barred spiral and an unbarred one. At 50 million light-years from Earth it is six times closer than the Lindsay-Shapley ring, yet the article notes that both NGC 2442 and NGC 2434 may be difficult to see clearly, suggesting that observers should not expect them to be straightforward binocular targets. The 50-million-light-year distance puts NGC 2442 in a very different cosmic neighbourhood from the ring galaxies also found in the constellation, and its intermediate classification hints at complex internal dynamics. Together, the presence of a ring galaxy, a second ring-shaped object in Graham's Object, and an intermediate spiral within one small constellation's borders gives Volans a disproportionately rich inventory of unusual galactic morphologies relative to its modest size and faint stars.
08 Graham's Object and a second ring galaxy Deeper
Volans contains a third ring-shaped galaxy known as Graham's Object, which carries the informal alternative names Das Rheingold and Nibelungen Ring — evocative labels borrowed from Wagnerian opera that hint at the romantic tradition of naming striking astronomical objects with literary flair. It sits at right ascension 6 hours 41.4 minutes and declination negative 74 degrees 19 arcminutes in the epoch 2000.0 coordinate system. The article provides no distance estimate or discovery date for Graham's Object, leaving its physical scale uncertain compared to the Lindsay-Shapley ring. Nevertheless, the presence of two separately catalogued ring galaxies within a single small southern constellation is statistically noteworthy and suggests that Volans, despite its low profile among casual stargazers, has attracted serious attention from galaxy morphology researchers studying the aftermath of galactic collisions.
09 Variable stars awaiting more observations
Not all of Volans's scientific business is finished. In 2003 the Astronomical Society of Southern Africa issued an alert stating that observations of the variable stars R Volantis and S Volantis were very urgently needed because data on their light curves remained incomplete. Variable star monitoring depends on sustained observations over time, and gaps in historical records can make it impossible to reconstruct how a star's brightness has changed across decades. The appeal from a professional society underscores that even constellations without famous named stars can hold objects of genuine research value. Whether that observational gap has since been filled is not addressed in the source material, but the 2003 report stands as a reminder that citizen astronomers and small-observatory operators contribute meaningfully to tracking stars that larger facilities may overlook in favour of more immediately rewarding targets.