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Science & history · Constellation guide

Taurus, the bull

Taurus is the bull charging at Orion. Its face is a V of stars, the Hyades, with orange Aldebaran as the eye, and the Pleiades ride on its back.

Where is it from where I am?

Where Taurus is among the stars NASA's star map around Taurus, about 44 degrees across, north up and east to the left, with this site's chart lines and labels over it. Labelled: Aldebaran, Elnath, Alcyone. AldebaranElnathAlcyone NE

Show in my sky

North is up and east is to the left, the way the sky looks from underneath. The pattern turns through the night, so match it by shape, not angle. Lines are this site's own drawing, a convention: the IAU defines constellations as areas of sky with official boundaries, not as stick figures. The sky map draws the fuller IAU figures. Sky image: NASA/GSFC Scientific Visualization Studio, Deep Star Maps 2020.
About this picture

NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center Scientific Visualization Studio. Gaia DR2: ESA/Gaia/DPAC. Constellation figures based on those developed for the IAU by Alan MacRobert of Sky and Telescope magazine (Roger Sinnott and Rick Fienberg). NASA's page (opens in a new tab).

The map is a composite of 1.7 billion catalogued stars, not a photograph from one place: it shows stars far too faint for the eye, and no weather, Moon or city light. It is drawn here in this chart's projection, with each star where it was in 2000; the fastest-moving bright star has shifted about a minute of arc since, far less than a pixel here.

How to spot it: A V of stars with orange Aldebaran, and the tight Pleiades cluster nearby. Source (opens in a new tab)

What you are looking at

Half a bull, head down: a V-shaped face, an orange eye and a star cluster on its back.

Only the front half of the bull (opens in a new tab) is shown in the sky. Its face is the V-shaped Hyades, its eye the reddish star Aldebaran, and the Pleiades sit on its back; one horn ends at the foot of Auriga. In Greek myth it was usually Zeus, disguised as the bull that carried away Europa.

The pairing with Orion is very old. Ridpath (opens in a new tab) traces it to the Sumerians, who called these stars GUD AN-NA, the bull of heaven, facing their hero in Orion.

Sources for this section Ian Ridpath, Star Tales: Taurus (opens in a new tab); Ian Ridpath, Star Tales: Orion (opens in a new tab)

The Hyades, and Aldebaran in front of them

The V is a real star cluster; its brightest-looking star is not a member.

The Hyades are a true cluster: young but mature stars (opens in a new tab), hundreds of millions of years old and widely spread out, and the cluster nearest to us.

Bright orange Aldebaran stands out in the V but is not actually a member (opens in a new tab): it happens to lie between us and the Hyades. ESA's list (opens in a new tab) puts Aldebaran at 65 light-years.

The IAU (opens in a new tab) gives the Hyades and Pleiades together, the “Golden Gate of the Ecliptic”, as an example of an asterism made of clusters.

Sources for this section Kat Troche (Astronomical Society of the Pacific), Spot the Young Stars of the Hyades and Pleiades, NASA Night Sky Network (2023) (opens in a new tab); ESA, Hipparcos: The 50 Brightest Stars (opens in a new tab); International Astronomical Union, The Constellations (opens in a new tab)

The Pleiades

The Pleiades are a real cluster of over a thousand young stars, not a constellation.

Messier 45 (opens in a new tab), the Pleiades or Seven Sisters, is an open cluster of more than a thousand stars loosely held together by gravity, of which a handful of bright ones dominate the view. It has no known discoverer; Galileo was the first to look at it through a telescope.

Its distance was argued over for years. The Night Sky Network (opens in a new tab) recounts that the Hipparcos satellite measured about 392 light-years, Hubble about 440 and radio interferometry 443, with Gaia's results close to the last two. NASA's Messier page (opens in a new tab) uses about 445 and adds that the figure is not universally agreed.

By age the Pleiades sit between their neighbours: younger than the Hyades (opens in a new tab), older than the newborn stars of the Orion Nebula, and already free of the gas they formed from.

Sources for this section NASA Hubble, Messier 45 (the Pleiades) (opens in a new tab); Kat Troche (Astronomical Society of the Pacific), Spot the Young Stars of the Hyades and Pleiades, NASA Night Sky Network (2023) (opens in a new tab)

How to find it

From Orion's belt, look the other way from Sirius.

The Night Sky Network's method (opens in a new tab): find Orion's belt, then look west of Orion for the Hyades and the Pleiades. In early January evenings, it notes, the Pleiades, the Hyades and Orion are all rising in the east for Northern Hemisphere observers, and in December (opens in a new tab) Taurus stands above Orion as evening falls.

By this site's calculation (opens in a new tab), the bull's middle stands about 72° up in the south at its highest from 40°N and about 33° up in the north from 35°S, and it is highest at about 9 p.m. local time in mid-January.

Sources for this section Kat Troche (Astronomical Society of the Pacific), Spot the Young Stars of the Hyades and Pleiades, NASA Night Sky Network (2023) (opens in a new tab); NASA Science, What's Up: December 2024 (opens in a new tab); Bright Star Catalogue, 5th Revised Ed. (Hoffleit & Warren 1991), as computed by this site's star engine (opens in a new tab)

What you can actually see

All three groups show to the eye; binoculars turn each into a field of stars.

The Pleiades, at magnitude 1.6, are easy to see with the unaided eye (opens in a new tab) from a relatively dark site. Binoculars (opens in a new tab) bring out many more stars and details in the Pleiades, the Hyades and the Orion Nebula alike.

The blue wisps in long-exposure photographs of the Pleiades are dust: NASA describes (opens in a new tab) streams of dust particles near the star Merope, sorted by the star's radiation.

Keep in mind Photographs show far more detail and colour than the eye can (opens in a new tab); by eye the Pleiades are a tight knot of blue-white stars without the haze.

Sources for this section NASA Hubble, Messier 45 (the Pleiades) (opens in a new tab); Kat Troche (Astronomical Society of the Pacific), Spot the Young Stars of the Hyades and Pleiades, NASA Night Sky Network (2023) (opens in a new tab); Kat Troche (Astronomical Society of the Pacific), The Great Rift, NASA Night Sky Network (2025) (opens in a new tab)

Often confused with

The Pleiades' little dipper is not the Little Dipper, and Aldebaran is not a Hyades star.

The Pleiades are small and almost dipper-shaped (opens in a new tab), which makes them easy to mistake for a small Little Dipper. The real Little Dipper is much larger and fainter and turns around Polaris in the north; Ridpath (opens in a new tab) describes its seven stars, mostly faint.

And the Pleiades are an open cluster (opens in a new tab), not a constellation: a physical family of stars inside the constellation Taurus. Clusters and chance patterns explains the difference.

Sources for this section Kat Troche (Astronomical Society of the Pacific), Spot the Young Stars of the Hyades and Pleiades, NASA Night Sky Network (2023) (opens in a new tab); Ian Ridpath, Star Tales: Ursa Minor (opens in a new tab); NASA Hubble, Messier 45 (the Pleiades) (opens in a new tab)

The Crab Nebula

Near the bull's horn lies the wreck of a star that Chinese astronomers saw explode in 1054.

In 1054 Chinese astronomers recorded a “guest star” (opens in a new tab) visible in the daytime sky for nearly a month. It was a supernova, and its remnant is the Crab Nebula, 6,500 light-years away and about six light-years across.

At its centre a rapidly spinning pulsar (opens in a new tab), the collapsed core of the star, drives wisps of material outward at half the speed of light.

Sources for this section NASA Hubble, Messier 1 (the Crab Nebula) (opens in a new tab)

Where on Earth, and when

The whole key pattern rises from anywhere north of about 61°S.

South of about 74°S, none of it rises.

North of about 74°N, the whole key pattern never sets.

Its middle climbs at least 20° high, the finder's threshold for a suggestion, from anywhere north of about 48°S.

It is highest in the evening sky, at about 9 p.m. local time, in mid-January, from either hemisphere, wherever it rises. With daylight saving time, that is nearer 10 p.m. on the clock.

Worked out by this site from the Bright Star Catalogue, for a flat, clear horizon. Hills, buildings, haze and city light all cut into this; the air also lifts objects near the horizon by about half a degree. For your own place and night, use the sky finder.

Sources

All constellations and asterisms →

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