Delta Canis Majoris
star
Delta Canis Majoris is a supergiant star in the constellation of Canis Major. It is formally named Wezen (); Delta Canis Majoris is its Bayer designation. At an apparent magnitude of +1.83, it is the third-brightest star in the constellation. Based on parallax measurements, it is located at a distance of approximately 1,600 light years. Since 1943, the spectrum of this star has served as one of the stable anchor points by which other stars are classified.
Observation
Delta Canis Majoris is the third-brightest star in the constellation after Sirius and ε Canis Majoris (Adhara), with an apparent magnitude of +1.83, and is white or yellow-white in colour. Lying about 10 degrees south southeast of Sirius, it only rises to about 11 degrees above the horizon at the latitude of the United Kingdom. The open cluster NGC 2354 is located only 1.3 degrees east of Delta Canis Majoris. As with the rest of Canis Major, Delta Canis Majoris is most visible in winter skies in the northern hemisphere, and summer skies in the southern. In Bayer's Uranometria, it is in the Great Dog's hind quarter.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 23, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q13411. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1943.
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This entry incorporates text from “Delta Canis Majoris” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.