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Octans is a faint constellation located in the deep Southern Sky. Its name is Latin for the eighth part of a circle, but it is named after the octant, a navigational instrument. Devised by French astronomer Nicolas Louis de Lacaille in 1752, Octans remains one of the 88 modern constellations. The southern celestial pole is located within the boundaries of Octans.
It was part of his catalogue of the southern sky, the Coelum Australe Stelliferum, which was published posthumously in 1763. In Europe, it became more widely known as Octans Hadleianus, in honor of England mathematician John Hadley, who invented the octant in 1730. There is no real mythology related to Octans, partially due to its faintness and relative recentness, but mostly because of its extreme southerly latitude.
This constellation is unusual on that its brightest member has a very late Bayer designation: Nu Octantis. A spectral class K1 IV subgiant with an apparent magnitude 3.73, it has a white dwarf companion and is orbited by one exoplanet.
Beta Octantis is the second brightest star in the constellation.
Sigma Octantis, the southern pole star, is a magnitude 5.4 star just over 1 degree away from the true south celestial pole. Its relative faintness means that it is not practical for navigation.
BQ Octantis is a fainter, magnitude 6.82 star located much closer to the South Pole (at less than a degree) than Sigma.
In addition to having the current southern pole star of Earth, Octans also contains the southern pole star of the planet Saturn, which is the magnitude 4.3 Delta Octantis.
The Astronomical Society of Southern Africa in 2003 reported that observations of the Mira variable stars R Octantis and T Octantis were urgently needed.
At least four star systems are known to have planets. Mu2 Octantis is a binary star system, the brighter component of which has a planet. Nu Octantis A also has a planet orbiting. HD 142022 is a binary system, a component of which is a sunlike star with a massive planet with an orbital period of 1928 ± 46 days. HD 212301 is a yellow-white main sequence star with a hot jupiter that completes an orbit every 2.2 days.
was a [[stores ship]] used by the United States Navy during World War II.
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