Procyon , ( Alpha Canis Minoris ). It is the most important star in the constellation Canis Minor (The Lesser Dog) and the eighth brightest in the night sky, with a stellar magnitude of +0.50. It is a binary whose main component Procyon “A” is a yellowish-white subgiant 2.1 times larger than the Sun and 7.3 times brighter. Procyon “B” is a white dwarf that is very difficult to observe from Earth , as it has a stellar magnitude of +10.82 and orbits the main star with a frequency of 40.8 years.
Summary
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- 1 Location
- 2 Mythology
- 3 Origin of the name
- 4 Sources
Location
The constellation Dog Minor is identified in the winter night sky near Orion. With the naked eye we can observe two stars, so the constellation is limited to a line that joins two points, one of them is Procyon, the only one of the first magnitude in this constellation.
It is one of the closest systems, at a distance of approximately 11 light-years from Earth and forms together with Betelgeuse and Sirius the so – called Winter Triangle .
Mythology
Both constellations, Can Major and Can Minor, represent the dogs of the giant hunter Orion, in Greek mythology . It could also be the dog Mera, who with her laments because of having found the corpses of her masters Icario and Erígone, attracted people to bury them. Another variant is that it would be Cephalus’s dog that tried to hunt down Teumeso’s fox.
Name’s origin
The name of Procyon comes from the Greek Prokyōn, which means “before the dog”, since in the northern latitudes its appearance precedes Sirius , the other “star of the dog”. Both were already venerated by the ancient Egyptians and appear in Babylonian texts
