Some constellations make you work to see the picture. Taurus practically hands it to you. There’s a fiery orange star for the bull’s eye, a perfect V of stars for its face, and a sparkling little cluster riding just above like a tiny dipper. It’s one of the oldest patterns humans ever named, painted onto cave walls and clay tablets thousands of years ago, and it’s still one of the most rewarding things you can find on a crisp winter night.
So let’s go find Taurus the Bull, and the treasures hiding inside it.
Let Orion Point the Way
Here’s the easiest trick in the sky. You don’t even have to hunt for Taurus directly, you just let its famous neighbor do the work.
Find Orion first, which is simple thanks to the three bright stars of Orion’s Belt lined up in a row. Now draw a line up and to the right through those belt stars, and keep going. You’ll run smack into a bright, distinctly reddish-orange star. That’s Aldebaran, the eye of the Bull, and once you’ve got it, the rest of Taurus opens up around it. Orion and Taurus are next-door neighbors, and the belt always points the way.
Aldebaran: The Bull’s Fiery Red Eye
Aldebaran is the brightest star in Taurus and the 13th brightest in the whole night sky, glowing with an unmistakable warm orange color. That color is a clue to what it actually is, an aging star that has swollen into a red giant, the bloated stage every Sun-like star eventually reaches. It’s already grown so large that its diameter reaches out roughly to where Mercury orbits our Sun.
Here’s a fun bit of cosmic trickery though. Aldebaran looks like it sits right in the middle of the V-shaped cluster of stars that forms the bull’s face, but it’s actually a fake-out. Aldebaran is only about 65 light-years away, while the cluster behind it sits more than twice as far off. They just happen to line up from our point of view. If you want help telling star colors apart, our beginner’s guide to the sky’s colorful stars is a handy companion.
Two Star Clusters for the Price of One
This is where Taurus really shows off. It contains two of the closest star clusters to Earth, and both are visible to the naked eye.
The first is the Hyades, that V-shaped group that outlines the bull’s face. At about 150 light-years away it’s the nearest proper star cluster to us, and on a dark night you can pick out a dozen or so of its stars without any equipment at all.
The second is the showstopper, the Pleiades, also called the Seven Sisters. It sits just above the bull’s head like a tiny, misty dipper, a compact knot of blue-white stars wrapped in a faint haze. It’s genuinely one of the most beautiful sights in the sky through a pair of binoculars, and here a telescope is actually overkill, it zooms in too far and cuts out members of the sparkling little family.
The Crab Nebula: Wreckage of an Exploding Star
Tucked near the tip of one of the bull’s horns is a target with an incredible backstory. It’s Messier 1, better known as the Crab Nebula, and it was the very first object the astronomer Charles Messier logged in his famous catalog back in the 1700s.
What makes it special is what it actually is, the shredded remains of a star that blew itself apart. Chinese astronomers recorded the supernova that created it back in the year 1054, when a brand-new “guest star” suddenly appeared bright enough to see in daylight. What you’re looking at now is the expanding wreckage from that blast. If cosmic explosions fascinate you, our explainer on what a supernova really is digs into the physics, and deep in the Crab’s heart spins a pulsar, one of those spinning stellar lighthouses, the crushed core the dead star left behind.
When to Look for the Bull
Taurus is a constellation of autumn and winter evenings for Northern Hemisphere skywatchers. It climbs into the east-northeast early in the evening through late fall, making it perfect for an after-dinner look upward, and rides high through the winter months.
A nice bonus, Taurus lends its name to the Taurid meteor shower, which peaks in November and is known for producing the occasional slow, bright fireball. So even the shooting stars in this part of the sky carry the Bull’s name.
For more on Taurus and its deep-sky treasures, check out the detailed guide from Constellation Guide and EarthSky’s overview of Taurus and its two fabulous star clusters.
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