Canopus resides in the constellation Carina, the Keel. Carina is one of three modern-day constellations that once formed the ancient constellation of Argo Navis, named for the ship Jason and the Argonauts sailed in to search for the Golden Fleece. Two other constellations form the sail (Vela) and the stern (Puppis).

In modern odysseys, spacecraft like Voyager 2 used the light from Canopus to orient themselves in the sea of space.

Canopus is a true powerhouse. Its brilliance is due more to its great luminosity than its proximity. This number two on our list of stars has 14,800 times the intrinsic luminosity of the Sun! But at 316 light-years away, it's more than 37 times as far from us as the number one star, Sirius.

With a magnitude of minus-0.72, Canopus is easy to find in the night sky, though it is only visible at latitudes south of 37 degrees north.

To catch a glimpse of it from middle-latitude or southern locations in the United States, look for a bright star low on the southern horizon during the winter months. Canopus is 36 degrees below the brightest star in the sky, Sirius. The further south you are, the better your view will be.

Canopus is a yellow-white F super giant—a star with a temperature from 5,500 to 7,800 degrees Celsius (10,000 to 14,000 degrees Fahrenheit)—that has stopped hydrogen fusion and is now converting its core helium into carbon. This process has led to its current size, 65 times that of the Sun. If we were to replace our Sun with Canopus, it would nearly envelop Mercury.

Canopus will eventually become one of the largest white dwarfs in the galaxy and might just be massive enough to fuse its carbon, turning into a rare neon-oxygen white dwarf. These are rare because most white dwarfs have carbon-oxygen cores, but a massive star like Canopus can begin to burn its carbon into neon and oxygen as it evolves into a small, dense, and cooler object.

Canopus lost its place in the celestial hierarchy for a short time in the 1800s when the star Eta Carinae underwent a massive outburst, surpassing Canopus in brightness and briefly becoming the second-brightest star in the sky. And Eta Carinae may yet outdo even Sirius, the brightest. It is fated to become a supernova, perhaps very soon in cosmic time-terms: within a few hundred thousand years.