Canes Venatici Canes Venatici Canes Venatici is one of the 88 official modern constellations. It is a small northern constellation that was created by Johannes Hevelius in the 17th century. Its name is Latin for "hunting dogs", and the constellation is often depicted in illustrations as representing the dogs of Boötes the Herdsman, a neighboring constellation. Cor Caroli is the constellation's brightest star, with an apparent magnitude of 2.9. La Superba is one of the reddest stars in the sky and one of the brightest carbon stars. The Whirlpool Galaxy is a spiral galaxy tilted face-on to observers on Earth, and was
Beta Boötis It bore the traditional name "Nekkar" or "Nakkar" derived from the Arabic name for the constellation: "Al Baḳḳār" 'the Herdsman'. In 2016, the International Astronomical Union organized a Working Group on Star Names (WGSN) to catalogue and standardize proper names for stars. The WGSN approved the name "Nekkar" for this star on 21 August 2016 and it is now so included in the List of IAU-approved Star Names. Nakkar has more than three times the mass of the Sun and greater than 21 times the Sun's radius. (König et al. (2006) give it 3.4 solar masses, while Tetzlaff et al.