Lepus

Lepus crouches beneath Orion's feet as the hare of the hunt, its stars modest and its brightest carrying the Arabic name Arneb. A much fainter star nearby earned its own nickname for a single, startling property: its colour.

R Leporis, known as Hind's Crimson Star after the British astronomer John Russell Hind who observed and described its intense colour in 1845, is a carbon star, a class of aging stars whose outer atmosphere is rich in carbon compounds that absorb blue light and let through mostly red, producing a colour deeper and more saturated than almost any other star visible through a small telescope or binoculars. Its brightness also varies considerably over a period of roughly fourteen months, so that the star is sometimes easy to find and strikingly obvious in colour, and at other times faint enough to miss.

Carbon stars of this kind are relatively rare and are prized by amateur observers precisely for how startling the colour looks compared to the white or pale yellow of most naked-eye stars, a visual effect that needs no instrument beyond a modest telescope to appreciate, unlike most of the deep-sky objects that require long exposure photography to show any colour at all.

The hare fleeing beneath the hunter and his dogs carries, tucked into its outline, one of the most vividly coloured single stars an amateur astronomer can point a telescope at.

Lepus is a small southern constellation, one of Ptolemy's forty-eight, lying just beneath the feet of Orion the Hunter. It represents a hare, and the ancients fittingly placed it near Orion and his hunting dogs, as though the hare were being pursued across the sky; one tradition holds it flees before the greater dog, Canis Major, to the east. Its stars are modest, its brightest bearing the Arabic-derived name Arneb, meaning the hare. In astronomical tradition the constellation is a pattern of stars rather than a sign of the zodiac, and its lore is that of the celestial hunt gathered around Orion rather than of astrology. These are the features of Lepus as the classical and modern traditions describe it, distinct from any astrological reading of the sky in which it sits.

Immediately east of Lepus and Canis Major, filling a stretch of sky the ancient tradition left unmarked, sits Monoceros, the unicorn, introduced in the early seventeenth century and generally credited to Petrus Plancius or Jakob Bartsch; unlike Lepus, which Ptolemy catalogued in the second century, Monoceros carries no classical figure or myth behind it at all, its unicorn drawn from the heraldic and emblematic imagination of early modern Europe rather than from antiquity.