Delphinus

Astronomers generally don’t play many official practical jokes. But an Italian astronomer played one more than two centuries ago. And the joke is still there for everyone to see. It’s in Delphinus, the dolphin.

The constellation is small and fairly dim. But five of its stars form an outline that really does resemble a dolphin, making it easy to find. It’s a third of the way up the eastern sky at nightfall, with the dolphin’s tail on the right and its snout on the left.

The brightest members of the outline are Beta and Alpha Delphini. Beta is a binary – two stars bound by their mutual gravitational pull. Both are bigger, brighter, and heavier than the Sun. Alpha consists of three stars. All of them are more impressive than the Sun, with the main star almost four times the mass of the Sun.

The stars also have proper names. Beta is known as Rotanev; Alpha is called Sualocin. And that’s where the joke comes in.

The names first appeared in 1814, in an atlas published by the director of the Palermo Observatory. The names caught on, but their origin was a mystery. It was solved by a British astronomer 45 years later.

He realized that the observatory’s assistant director at the time was Niccolo Cacciatori. In English, the name would be Nicholas Hunter; in Latin, Nicolaus Venator. Spell the Latin names backwards, and you come up with Sualocin and Rotanev – a little joke among the stars of the dolphin.

Script by Damond Benningfield