Wikipedia:Today's featured article/January 1, 2014

Phoenix is a constellation in the southern sky that stretches from roughly −39° to −57° declination, and from 23.5h to 2.5h of right ascension. 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 brightest star, Alpha Phoenicis, or Ankaa, is an orange giant of apparent magnitude 2.4. Nu Phoenicis has a dust disk, while the constellation boasts ten star systems with known planets, and HE0107-5240, possibly one of the oldest stars yet discovered. It has around 1/200,000 the metallicity that the Sun has and hence must have formed very early in the history of the universe. The recently discovered galaxy clusters El Gordo and the Phoenix Cluster—located 7.2 and 5.7 billion light years away respectively, are two of the largest objects in the visible universe. Phoenix is the radiant of two annual meteor showers: the Phoenicids in December, and the July Phoenicids. (Full article...)