Triangulum

November’s evening skies offer constellations with great names, intriguing back-stories, and beautiful star patterns. And then there’s Triangulum, which suffers from a distinct lack of imagination. As the name suggests, it consists of three main stars that form a triangle — an accurate if dull description for one of the smallest of all the constellations. It’s well up in the east as darkness falls.
The triangle is actually a thin wedge. And there’s an odd coincidence involving the stars at the base of the wedge: One of them is precisely third magnitude, while the other is precisely fourth magnitude.
Under the magnitude scale, a lower number means a brighter star. So the third-magnitude star is the brighter of the two — about two-and-a-half times brighter. Both stars are easily visible from dark skywatching sites, but are more difficult targets from the city.
The brighter star is Beta Trianguli. It’s a stellar giant about 127 light-years from Earth. The other, Gamma Trianguli, is a litt