One of the 12 constellations introduced at the end of the 16th century by the
Dutch navigators Pieter Dirkszoon Keyser and Frederick de Houtman after their
pioneer mapping of the southern skies. Grus represents a long-necked wading
bird, the crane.
The constellation was first shown on a celestial globe by Petrus Plancius in
1598 under the name Krane Grus, respectively Dutch and Latin words for crane,
although on a later Plancius globe issued posthumously in 1625 it bore the
alternative title of Phoenicopterus, the flamingo. As another identification,
de Houtman called it Den Reygher, the heron, in his southern star catalogue of 1603. Johannes Bayer adopted the
name Grus for the constellation in his Uranometria atlas of 1603, and the original identification as a crane won out.
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Grus cranes its neck in the Uranographia of Johann Bode (1801).
Grus was formed from stars south of Piscis Austrinus, the Southern Fish. The
constellation’s brightest star, of second magnitude, is named Alnair, from an abbreviation of
the Arabic meaning ‘the bright one from the fish’s tail’, for the Arabs had extended the tail of Piscis Austrinus southwards into this
region. There are no legends associated with Grus, but in Greek mythology the
crane was sacred to Hermes.
Chinese associations
Being so far south, the stars of Grus barely featured in the Chinese
constellation system. However, part of the Chinese constellation Baijiu lay in this area, representing a kind of celestial skip for waste. Baijiu consisted of four stars forming a tub shape. The present-day Gamma Gruis could
have been one of them, and possibly Lambda Gruis was a member too. The rest of Baijiu lay to the north in Piscis Austrinus.
© Ian Ridpath. All rights reserved
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