An Etymological Dictionary of Astronomy and Astrophysics
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The second brightest → globular cluster, after → Omega Centauri. It is seen on the sky near the → Small Magellanic Cloud in the southern constellation → Tucana. Its apparent size is 31', about the size of the full Moon. It is about 13,000 → light-years away and contains several million stars in a volume only about 120 light-years across.

47, the object number in the catalog of Johann Elert Bode (1747-1826) Allgemeine Beschreibung und Nachweisung der Gestirne nebst Verzeichniss, compiled in 1801; → Tucana.

The Toucan. A constellation of the southern hemisphere, at approximately 0h right ascension, -65° declination, represented as a toucan, a brightly colored South American bird with a very large, thick bill. Tucana contains the second most prominent → globular cluster in the sky, 47 Tucanae, and the → Small Magellanic Cloud. Abbreviation: Tuc; genitive: Tucanae. The constellation was one of twelve created by Petrus Plancius from the observations of Pieter Dirkszoon Keyser and Frederick de Houtman Houtman between 1595 and 1597, and it first appeared in Johann Bayer's Uranometria of 1603.

From Fr., from Portugese tucano, from tucan (onomatopoeia) in the language spoken by the Tupi Indians in Brazil.