One of the southern constellations devised
by the Dutch navigators Pieter Dirkszoon Keyser and Frederick
de Houtman at the end of the 16th century. It represents the
South American bird with a huge bill. In his catalogue of 1603
de Houtman called it Den Indiaenschen Exster, op Indies Lang
ghenaemt (“the Indian magpie, named Lang in the
Indies”, the word “lang” referring to the
bird’s long beak). De Houtman was apparently describing
not a toucan but the hornbill, a similarly endowed bird that is
native to the East Indies and Malaysia. However, the Dutchman
Petrus Plancius gave it the name Toucan when he first depicted
it on a globe in 1598, and Bayer followed suit on his atlas of
1603. This suggests that the inventor was in fact Keyser, who
had visited South America before his voyage to the East Indies
and could have seen the bird there.
Tucana’s brightest star is of only
third magnitude, but the constellation is distinguished by two
features: firstly, the globular star cluster 47 Tucanae, rated
the second-best such object in the entire sky, so bright that
it was labelled in the same way as a star; and the Small
Magellanic Cloud, the smaller and fainter of the two companion
galaxies of our Milky Way. None of the stars of Tucana are
named, and there are no legends associated with it.
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Tucana, holding in its beak a branch with a berry, as seen in the
Uranographia of Johann Bode. Behind its tail lies Nubecula Minor,
the Small Magellanic Cloud, now part of the constellation.
© Ian Ridpath. All rights reserved
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