● Canopus

  Canopus is a star in Carina.

                                               
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  Type            Yellow-white bright giant
  Constellation   Carina
  Magnitude       -0.7
  Spectral type   F0II
  Distance        313 light years
  You need        naked eye

  Known as
  Bayer           α Car
  Yale            HR 2326

  More information about Canopus

  Canopus is the second brightest star in the night sky, behind only
  Sirius. It sits so far south that it never clears the horizon above
  about 37 degrees north. It is a supergiant 313 light years away, nearly
  forty times further than Sirius, so it is genuinely one of the most
  luminous stars in our part of the galaxy. Spacecraft have navigated by
  it since the 1960s: it is brilliant, nowhere near the ecliptic, and
  there is nothing else nearby to mistake it for. It belongs to Carina,
  the keel of the ship, and where its name came from has never been
  settled. It may be the Egyptian port of Κάνωπος, at the western mouth of
  the Nile, whose burial jars are still called canopic. It may equally be
  Κάνωπος, the helmsman who steered Menelaus home from Troy and died of a
  snakebite on the Egyptian shore. The two cannot be separated, because
  the port may be named after the helmsman, or the helmsman invented to
  explain the port.

  Bayer lettered the stars of each constellation in his Uranometria of
  1603, in order of brightness. He was working from Tycho's magnitudes by
  eye, and the order he recorded is often wrong.

  First published in 1930 by Yale astronomer Frank Schlesinger, and
  maintained since, the Yale Bright Star Catalogue lists every star down
  to magnitude 6.5. It contains 9,110 stars.

  where it is tonight:  skymap.sh/Canopus