Phoenix is a minor constellation in the southern sky. Named after the mythical phoenix, it was first depicted on a celestial atlas by Johann Bayer in his 1603 Uranometria. The French explorer and astronomer Nicolas Louis de Lacaille charted the brighter stars and gave their Bayer designations in 1756. The constellation stretches from roughly −39° to −57° declination, and from 23.5h to 2.5h of right ascension. The constellations Phoenix, Grus, Pavo and Tucana, are known as the Southern Birds.
The constellation Phoenix as depicted in Johann Gabriel Doppelmayr's Atlas Coelestis, ca. 1742
The "southern birds", as depicted in Johann Bayer's Uranometria. Phoenix is on the lower left.
The constellation Phoenix as it can be seen by the naked eye
The phoenix is an immortal bird that cyclically regenerates or is otherwise born again. While it is part of Greek mythology, it has analogs in many cultures, such as Egyptian and Persian. Associated with the sun, a phoenix obtains new life by rising from the ashes of its predecessor. Some legends say it dies in a show of flames and combustion, while others that it simply dies and decomposes before being born again. In the Motif-Index of Folk-Literature, a tool used by folklorists, the phoenix is classified as motif B32.
A depiction of a phoenix by Friedrich Justin Bertuch (1806)
According to the Catalogue of the Greek Coins in the British Museum, the "Numidian crane" represents the phoenix on the coinage of Antoninus Pius (r. 138–161)
According to Harris Rackham, Pliny the Elder's description of a phoenix in Natural History "tallies fairly closely with the golden pheasant of the Far East"
5th-century mosaic of a nimbate phoenix from Daphne, Antioch, in Roman Syria (Louvre)