Camelopardalis, the Giraffe, is a large, faint, northern constellation. Hold your mouse cursor over the image to see constellation figures, boundaries, and star identifications. Its name comes from Latin via Greek and means giraffe, but the original words "kamelos" meant "camel", and "pardalis" meant "leopard". Presumably the figure was so named because it was imagined to have a long neck and spots like a leopard, but it has no ancient mythology associated with it since it was not invented until the 1600s. Camelopardalis is a very non-distinct constellation with its brightest stars being only fourth magnitude. It is hard to distinguish in the night sky. It is located between Cassiopeia and Cepheus to the west; Lynx and Ursa Major to the east; Perseus and Auriga to the south, and Ursa Minor and Draco to the north. Alpha Camelopardalis is a magnitude 4.26 spectral-type O blue supergiant with 40 to 50 times the mass of the Sun. Its distance is uncertain but it is estimated to be 3,000 to 6,000 light-years away. Alpha Camelopardalis is the third brightest star in the constellation. Alpha Camelopardalis was studied by the WISE satellite in infra-red and was found to be racing through space between 680 and 4,200 kilometers per second (between 1.5 and 9.4 million miles per hour), creating a bow shock ahead of it. Its high speed indicates that the star is probably a runaway, ejected either in a supernova explosion or through gravitational interactions in a star cluster. Because it is so massive, it will explode in a supernova in a million years. Alpha Camelopardalis does not have a common English name, but it is called Shâowéi in Chinese, which means " the Sixth Star of Right Wall of Purple Forbidden Enclosure." Beta Camelopardalis is the brightest star in the constellation shining at magnitude 4.03. It is located 997 light-years away. It is a spectral-type G class yellow supergiant. Deep-sky objects in Camelopardalis include galaxy IC 342 and Kemble's Cascade, a stellar asterism. Camelopardalis was cataloged by the Dutch astronomer Petrus Plancius in 1612 C.E. (Common Era). It is the 18th largest of today's 88 modern constellations, covering 757 square degrees of sky.
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