What is "pavo"

Pavo \Pa"vo\, n. [L., a peacock. See Peacock.]

1. (Zo["o]l.) A genus of birds, including the peacocks.

2. (Astron.) The Peacock, a constellation of the southern hemisphere.

Pavo may refer to:

• Pavo (constellation)
• Pavo (genus), a genus of peafowl
• Pavo, Georgia, a town in the United States

Pavo is a constellation in the southern sky with the Latin name for peacock. It is one of twelve constellations conceived by Petrus Plancius from the observations of Pieter Dirkszoon Keyser and Frederick de Houtman. Pavo first appeared on a 35-cm (14 in) diameter celestial globe published in 1598 in Amsterdam by Plancius and Jodocus Hondius and was depicted in Johann Bayer's star atlas Uranometria of 1603. French explorer and astronomer Nicolas-Louis de Lacaille gave its stars Bayer designations in 1756. The constellations Pavo, Grus, Phoenix and Tucana are collectively known as the "Southern Birds".

The constellation's brightest member, Alpha Pavonis, is also known as Peacock and appears as a 1.91- magnitude blue-white star, but is actually a spectroscopic binary. Delta Pavonis is a nearby Sun-like star some 19.9 light-years distant. Six of the star systems in Pavo have been found to host planets, including HD 181433 with a super-earth, and HD 172555 with evidence of a major interplanetary collision in the past few thousand years. The constellation contains NGC 6752, the third-brightest globular cluster in the sky, and the spiral galaxy NGC 6744, which closely resembles the Milky Way but is twice as large. Pavo is the radiant of two annual meteor showers: the Delta Pavonids and August Pavonids.

Pavo is a genus of two species in the pheasant family. The two species, along with the Congo peacock, are known as peafowl.

The modern constellation Pavo is not included in the Three Enclosures and Twenty-Eight Mansions system of traditional Chinese uranography because its stars are too far south for observers in China to know about them prior to the introduction of Western star charts. Based on the work of Xu Guangqi and the German Jesuit missionary Johann Adam Schall von Bell in the late Ming Dynasty, this constellation has been classified as one of the 23 Southern Asterisms (近南極星區, Jìnnánjíxīngōu) under the name Peacock (孔雀, Kǒngqiāo).

Possibly Peacock (Alpha Pavonis) is the bright star in this constellation that never seen in Chinese sky.

The name of the western constellation in modern Chinese is 孔雀座 (kǒng què zuò), which means "the peacock constellation".