Our Star
Identification: HD 221287
Type: yellow-white, dwarf
Constellation: Tucana

An artist’s impression of our planet as it orbits its star.

​Our Planet
Identification: HD 221287 b

An artist’s impression of the planet orbiting a star in the Tucana constellation.

HD 221287 b is a gas giant exoplanet that orbits a F-type star. Its mass is 3.09 Jupiters, it takes 456.1 days to complete one orbit of its star, and is 1.25 AU from its star. Its discovery was announced in 2007. It was detected using the radial velocity method.
You can see a simulation of the planet, star and system here.

Our Constellation

Tucana is a small dim galaxy in the southern hemisphere of the sky.

A representation of a toucan on the Tucana constellation.

It was created in the late sixteenth century based on observations by Dutch explorers and named after the toucan, a South American bird with a very large beak. It is a member of the “Southern Birds” group of constellations, together with Grus (“crane”), Pavo (“peacock”), and Phoenix.

The Tucana constellation showing the positions of the Small Magellanic Cloud and Tucanae 47 globular cluster.

Although Tucana’s stars are not particularly bright the area of the constellation contains two interesting deep sky objects.

The Small Magellanic Cloud (SMC) can be seen with the naked eye and looks like a faint fuzzy patch in the sky close to the Milky Way. It is actually a galaxy containing several hundred million stars and is one of our galaxy’s closest neighbours.

47 Tucanae is the second brightest globular cluster in the sky and can be seen with the naked eye although it is not as bright as the SMC. Globular clusters are roughly spherical, densely packed collections of ancient stars. They may contain millions of stars and orbit galaxies as satellites.

The yellow arrow points to the approximate position of our star although it is not visible to the naked eye.

The easiest way to find Tucana is with a smartphone app. There are plenty available for both Android and iPhone.