Taurus is a striking zodiac constellation depicting a bull charging toward the nearby hunter Orion. It occupies a particularly beautiful part of the winter sky, with the Hyades star cluster forming the Bull’s V-shaped face and the stunning Pleiades nearby.
The Bull is also one of the oldest constellation figures in the sky, with a history stretching back thousands of years—long before the familiar Greek myths became attached to it.
Taurus Is Best Seen in Winter
For Northern Hemisphere observers, Taurus is an autumn and winter constellation and is particularly well placed in the evening during December and January. It can be seen from latitudes between about +90° and −65°, making it visible from much of the Southern Hemisphere as well, where it appears during spring and summer.
The Bull lies beside Orion, so one of the easiest ways to locate it is to begin with Orion’s distinctive three-star Belt. Follow the direction of the Belt toward the orange-red star Aldebaran and the broad V-shaped group of stars surrounding it. You’ve found the face of Taurus.
The Hyades Form the Bull’s V-Shaped Face
Once you’ve located the broad V beside Orion, you’re looking at the Hyades, the nearest open star cluster to Earth. Its stars form the face of Taurus, while bright orange-red Aldebaran appears to sit within the cluster as one of the Bull’s eyes.
Appearances are deceptive, however. The Hyades lies about 150 light-years away, while Aldebaran is only around 65 light-years from Earth. The Bull’s fiery eye is therefore a foreground star that happens to lie along the same line of sight — Aldebaran isn’t actually part of the cluster forming the Bull’s face.
The Hyades itself is around 600–700 million years old and contains hundreds of stars. Under dark skies, around a dozen or more can be seen with the naked eye, although just a handful form the prominent V of the Bull’s face. The cluster was also associated with rain and stormy weather in the ancient world, a connection reflected in Greek traditions surrounding the Hyades.
The Stars That Trace the Bull
Once you’ve recognized the Hyades, it’s easy to mistake the V-shaped face for Taurus itself. But the constellation extends much farther across the sky. From the Hyades, two lines of stars stretch eastward to form the Bull’s long horns, ending at Elnath in the north and Zeta Tauri in the south.
Elnath is the brighter of the two horn-tip stars, while the fainter Zeta Tauri provides a useful landmark: the Crab Nebula lies nearby, giving us a starting point for finding one of Taurus’s most remarkable deep-sky objects.
Principal Stars in Taurus
Taurus contains several bright and interesting stars, ranging from orange and red giants to much hotter blue-white stars. Its principal stars also lie at very different distances from Earth, reminding us that the Bull’s familiar shape is only a line-of-sight pattern rather than a physical group of stars.
- Aldebaran (Alpha Tauri) is Taurus’s brightest star, shining at around magnitude 0.9 from a distance of about 65 light-years. It is an orange K-type giant more than 40 times the Sun’s radius and several hundred times as luminous.
- Elnath (Beta Tauri) is Taurus’s second-brightest star at magnitude 1.65 and marks the tip of the Bull’s northern horn. Located about 130 light-years away, it is a hot blue-white B-type giant that shines hundreds of times more brightly than the Sun.
- Alcyone (Eta Tauri) is a blue-white B-type giant about 440 light-years away and the brightest star in the Pleiades. Shining at magnitude 2.9, it is around six times more massive than the Sun.
- Zeta Tauri (Tianguan) shines at around magnitude 3 and marks the tip of the Bull’s southern horn. This hot blue-white B-type binary star lies roughly 440 light-years away and is also a useful landmark for locating the nearby Crab Nebula.
- Lambda Tauri is a blue B-type multiple-star system roughly 480 light-years away that shines at about magnitude 3.5. Its two principal stars form an eclipsing binary, causing the system’s apparent brightness to fall as the stars repeatedly pass in front of one another from our viewpoint.
- 119 Tauri (CE Tauri) is a much fainter but strikingly red M-type supergiant around 1,800 light-years away. Visible to the naked eye under sufficiently dark skies at around magnitude 4.3, it is an enormous star estimated to be hundreds of times the radius of the Sun.
The Seven Sisters Contain More Than 1,000 Stars
Off toward the Bull’s back lies a very different-looking star cluster. The Pleiades (M45) appears as a tight little gathering of blue-white stars, easily visible to the naked eye and particularly impressive through binoculars. Traditionally known as the Seven Sisters, most observers can distinguish around six stars without optical aid, although the cluster actually contains more than a thousand members. The brightest of the Pleiades is Alcyone.
The Pleiades lie around 440 light-years away and are only about 100 million years old, making them much younger than the Hyades we encountered in the Bull’s face. The contrast is visible in the sky: the young Pleiades form a compact group, while the much older and nearer Hyades are spread across a far larger area around the Bull’s face.
There’s also a lovely connection back to the Bull’s red eye. The name Aldebaran comes from an Arabic expression meaning “the follower,” because the star appears to follow the Pleiades across the night sky.
A Supernova So Bright It Was Visible in Daylight
The lower horn of Taurus points toward something far more dramatic. Close to Zeta Tauri lies the Crab Nebula (M1), the expanding remains of a massive star whose explosion was seen from Earth almost a thousand years ago.
Chinese astronomers recorded the event in 1054 as a new “guest star,” which remained visible in daylight for several weeks. Today, roughly 6,500 light-years away, the expanding debris surrounds the Crab Pulsar, a rapidly spinning neutron star left behind by the explosion.
You won’t see the Crab Nebula with the naked eye, but under a dark sky it can be detected with a small telescope as a faint, hazy patch. Zeta Tauri provides a useful starting point for finding it: follow the Bull’s lower horn and you’re approaching the remains of a stellar explosion actually witnessed by humans centuries ago.
The Taurids Are Known for Bright Fireballs
Taurus also gives its name to the Taurid meteor shower, which is active during the autumn as Earth passes through debris associated with Comet Encke. The Taurids actually consist of two closely related showers — the Northern and Southern Taurids — both appearing to radiate from the direction of Taurus.
The Taurids aren’t known for producing huge numbers of meteors. Instead, they’re famous for something more spectacular: unusually bright meteors and occasional fireballs. Activity extends through much of October and November, although rates are usually modest at around five meteors per hour.
Why Taurus Is a Bull
People have been seeing a bull in this part of the sky for thousands of years. In Greek mythology, Taurus is most commonly associated with Zeus and Europa. Zeus transformed himself into a magnificent white bull to approach the Phoenician princess Europa. When she climbed onto his back, he carried her across the sea to Crete, where she later became the mother of King Minos.
But the celestial Bull is much older than this Greek story. In ancient Mesopotamia, the constellation was known as the Bull of Heaven, which also appears in the Epic of Gilgamesh. By the time Taurus appeared in Greek astronomy, the association between this part of the sky and a bull already had a very long history.
So the Bull we’ve just traced from its V-shaped face to its long horns isn’t simply a modern pattern imposed on the stars. People were imagining a bull here thousands of years before the constellation received the Greek story most familiar to us today.
