page_title: Tucana
section_title: Deep-sky objects
hierarchical_section_title: Tucana / Features / Deep-sky objects
caption_attribution_description: English: It may be famous for hosting spectacular sights such as the Tucana Dwarf Galaxy and 47 Tucanae (heic1510), the second brightest globular cluster in the night sky, but the southern constellation of Tucana (The Toucan) also possesses a variety of unsung cosmic beauties. One such beauty is NGC 299, an open star cluster located within the Small Magellanic Cloud just under 200 000 light-years away. Open clusters such as this are collections of stars weakly bound by the shackles of gravity, all of which formed from the same massive molecular cloud of gas and dust. Because of this, all the stars have the same age and composition, but vary in their mass because they formed at different positions within the cloud. This unique property not only ensures a spectacular sight when viewed through a sophisticated instrument attached to a telescope such as Hubble’s Advanced Camera for Surveys, but gives astronomers a cosmic laboratory in which to study the formation and evolution of stars — a process that is thought to depend strongly on a star’s mass.
context_page_description: Tucana is a constellation of stars in the southern sky, named after the toucan, a South American bird. It is one of twelve constellations conceived in the late sixteenth century by Petrus Plancius from the observations of Pieter Dirkszoon Keyser and Frederick de Houtman. Tucana first appeared on a 35-centimetre-diameter celestial globe published in 1598 in Amsterdam by Plancius and Jodocus Hondius and was depicted in Johann Bayer's star atlas Uranometria of 1603. French explorer and astronomer Nicolas Louis de Lacaille gave its stars Bayer designations in 1756. The constellations Tucana, Grus, Phoenix and Pavo are collectively known as the "Southern Birds".
  Tucana is not a prominent constellation as all of its stars are third magnitude or fainter; the brightest is Alpha Tucanae with an apparent visual magnitude of 2.87. Beta Tucanae is a star system with six member stars, while Kappa is a quadruple system. Five star systems have been found to have exoplanets to date. The constellation contains 47 Tucanae, one of the brightest globular clusters in the sky, and most of the Small Magellanic Cloud.
context_section_description: The second-brightest globular cluster in the sky after Omega Centauri, 47 Tucanae (NGC 104) lies just west of the Small Magellanic Cloud. Only 14,700 light-years distant from Earth, it is thought to be around 12 billion years old. Mostly composed of old, yellow stars, it does possess a contingent of blue stragglers, hot stars that are hypothesized to form from binary star mergers. 47 Tucanae has an apparent magnitude of 3.9, meaning that it is visible to the naked eye; it is a Shapley class III cluster, which means that it has a clearly defined nucleus. Near to 47 Tucana on the sky, and often seen in wide-field photographs showing it, are two much more distant globular clusters associated with the SMC: NGC 121, 10 arcminutes away from the bigger cluster's edge, and Lindsay 8.
  NGC 362 is another globular cluster in Tucana with an apparent magnitude of 6.4, 27,700 light-years from Earth. Like neighboring 47 Tucanae, NGC 362 is a Shapley class III cluster and among the brightest globular clusters in the sky. Unusually for a globular cluster, its orbit takes it very close to the center of the Milky Way—approximately 3,000 light-years. It was discovered in the 1820s by James Dunlop. Its stars become visible at 180x magnification through a telescope.
  Located at the southern end of Tucana, the Small Magellanic Cloud is a dwarf galaxy that is one of the nearest neighbors to the Milky Way galaxy at a distance of 210,000 light-years. Though it probably formed as a disk shape, tidal forces from the Milky Way have distorted it. Along with the Large Magellanic Cloud, it lies within the Magellanic Stream, a cloud of gas that connects the two galaxies. NGC 346 is a star-forming region located in the Small Magellanic Cloud. It has an apparent magnitude of 10.3. Within it lies the triple star system HD 5980, each of its members among the most luminous stars known.
  The Tucana Dwarf galaxy, which was discovered in 1990, is a dwarf spheroidal galaxy of type dE5 that is an isolated member of the Local Group. It is located 870 kiloparsecs (2,800 kly) from the Solar System and around 1,100 kiloparsecs (3,600 kly) from the barycentre of the Local Group—the second most remote of all member galaxies after the Sagittarius Dwarf Irregular Galaxy.
  The barred spiral galaxy NGC 7408 is located 3 degrees northwest of Delta Tucanae, and was initially mistaken for a planetary nebula.
  In 1998, part of the constellation was the subject of a two-week observation program by the Hubble Space Telescope, which resulted in the Hubble Deep Field South. The potential area to be covered needed to be at the poles of the telescope's orbit for continuous observing, with the final choice resting upon the discovery of a quasar, QSO J2233-606, in the field.
caption: Open star cluster NGC 299 is located within the Small Magellanic Cloud.[53]
exif: {"Image ImageDescription": "It may be famous for hosting spectacular sights such as the Tucana Dwarf Galaxy and 47 Tucanae (heic1510), the second brightest globular cluster in the night sky, but the southern constellation of Tucana (The Toucan) also possesses a variety of unsung cosmic beauties. One such beauty is NGC 299, an open star cluster located within the Small Magellanic Cloud just under 200 000 light-years away. Open clusters such as this are collections of stars weakly bound by the shackles of gravity, all of which formed from the same massive molecular cloud of gas and dust. Because of this, all the stars have the same age and composition, but vary in their mass because they formed at different positions within the cloud. This unique property not only ensures a spectacular sight when viewed through a sophisticated instrument attached to a telescope such as Hubble\u2019s Advanced Camera for Surveys, but gives astronomers a cosmic laboratory in which to study the formation and evolution of stars \u2014 a process that is thought to depend strongly on a star\u2019s mass.", "Image Software": "Adobe Photoshop CC 2015 (Windows)", "Image DateTime": "2016:05:03 16:18:40"}