Table Mountain
| Abbreviation: | Men |
| Genitive: | Mensae |
| Origin: | Nicolas Louis de Lacaille, 1756 |
| Fully Visible: | 90°S – 5°N |
French astronomer Nicolas Louis de Lacaille (1713–1762) travelled to South Africa in the mid-eighteenth century where he constructed an observatory and spent two years observing the southern skies. Not only did he catalogue nearly 10,000 southern stars, he also surveyed 42 'nebulous' objects and devised over a dozen new constellations. Originally named Montagne de la Table, this faint southern hemisphere constellation was later Latinised to Mons Mensae and eventually shortened to just Mensa. It commemorates Table Mountain near the modern city of Cape Town and is the only constellation named after a geographical feature on the Earth. Part of the Large Magellanic Cloud spills over into this constellation from Dorado.
Notable Features
| Visible Named Stars | ||
|---|---|---|
| The brightest star in the constellation, α Mon, is a barely-visible fifth-magnitude. None of the visible stars in this constellation have an official name. | ||
| Other Interesting Stars | ||
| HD 38283 | Bubup | This seventh-magnitude star is known to have at least one exoplanet and lies between α Men and β Men. |
Copyright © 1995–2023 by L.M. Stockman and David Harper