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Stars and Sticks| Abbreviation | Sex |
|---|---|
| Meaning | Sextant |
| Pronunciation Guide is based on “Pronouncing Astronomical Names,” published in 1943 by the American Astronomical Society. | SEX-tunz |
| Genitive The genitive is the Latin possessive form used in star names. For example, Alpha Orionis means “the Alpha of Orion.” | seks-TAN-tis |
| Best Month | April |
| Visibility | Global |
| Origin | ModernAdded between the 17th and 18th centuries by astronomers like Hevelius or Plancius to define faint star clusters ignored by the ancients. |
| Author | HeveliusA Polish astronomer known as the "founder of lunar topography" who added several "filler" constellations using high-precision instruments. |
| Type | constellation |
| Difficulty | Expert |
| Description | The Sextant was created by Johannes Hevelius in 1687 to commemorate the loss of his great astronomical sextant — and most of his life's work — when his observatory in Danzig burned to the ground in a catastrophic fire in 1679. He had used the sextant to make precise naked-eye measurements of star positions achieving accuracy rivaling modern instrumentation. The constellation contains the Sextans Dwarf Galaxy — an extremely faint satellite galaxy of the Milky Way discovered only in 1990, about 280,000 light-years away, one of the many faint dwarf galaxies that were only revealed by modern wide-field surveys of our galactic neighborhood. |
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