Lacerta · Star Almanack

{% capture constellation_story %} A lizard does not need much space to disappear. In the northern sky, Lacerta has found an excellent hiding place: among the more conspicuous territories of Cygnus, Cepheus, Cassiopeia, Andromeda and Pegasus. Its faint stars ask the observer to pause between familiar landmarks. Johannes Hevelius gave this patch of sky its lizard in the seventeenth century. The constellation appeared in his atlas published in 1690, after his death. It belongs to the period when European astronomers were fitting new figures into spaces between the classical constellations. The stars were familiar; the particular animal drawn around them was an addition. That distinction gives Lacerta a different kind of story from its neighbors. Andromeda arrives with a princess, a sacrifice and a rescue. Pegasus carries a winged horse. Lacerta’s identity rests on the work of a mapmaker who decided that an overlooked stretch of stars could hold a smaller creature. There is no need to invent an ancient Greek adventure to explain its presence. Even the lizard’s extent was negotiable. John Flamsteed later enlarged the figure northward, taking in a triangle of stars that Hevelius had assigned to the turban of Cepheus. On a celestial map, the king’s clothing could become part of a reptile. Such changes reveal how much the figures depended on the people drawing them. Lacerta also contains an object whose name preserves a more surprising change of identity. BL Lacertae was once treated as a variable star. It is instead the active nucleus of a distant galaxy, and it became the namesake of a class of such objects. A point of light that looked stellar turned out to belong to something far beyond the Milky Way. The two transformations operate at different scales. Mapmakers changed the animal by changing its outline; astronomers changed their understanding of BL Lacertae by investigating the light itself. For someone looking up, the small lizard offers a reason to linger over a quiet-looking part of the sky. What first seems like a gap can turn out to have a history of its own. ## Sources - [Star Tales – Lacerta](https://ianridpath.com/startales/lacerta.html) - [Lacerta | Northern Berkshire Astronomical Society](https://nbasastro.org/articles/2026/08/lacerta/) - [Constellation of Lacerta](https://www.davidmalin.com/fujii/source/Lac.html) {% endcapture %}{{ constellation_story | markdownify }}