THE CONSTELLATION OF THE CAT

HD 85951 is an insignificant orange star barely visible to the naked eye in the direction of the constellation of Hydra, but that had once been chosen to be the brightest star in the constellation of Cat!

Unfortunately for cat lovers, this constellation no longer exists, but the history of his invention is special and deserves to be recalled.

The constellation was created almost as a joke in 1799 by the French astronomer Lalande. Lalande was a great cat lover who had devoted his whole life to studying the sky. Having become an old man, the astronomer playfully decided to create a constellation dedicated to his favorite animal, sorry that in the sky there were other felines such as the lion and the lynx but not the cat.

The constellation, created for entertainment, was taken seriously enough to be incorporated into Bode's Uranography. The constellation of the Cat thus survived for several years, until 1922 when the International Astronomical Union, trying to establish definitively which region of the sky belonged to which constellation, decided to eliminate the Cat, dividing its stars between the surrounding constellations.

In 2016, the UAI approved the Felis name for HD 85951.