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The Lynx is quite a large constellation that looks nothing at all like a lynx. Back in the seventeenth century, when astronomer Johannes Hevelius decided there needed to be a constellation between Ursa Major and Gemini, and began to study this area of very faint stars, he stated, "anyone who wants to study the stars here should have eyes like a lynx," and the name stuck.
Some like to see the constellation as a trail of little paw prints across the sky, like the tracks of a lynx in the snow, and as it turns out, there is a spiral galaxy within the constellation that really does look like a paw print. It's called the Bear Paw Galaxy, presumably for its close proximity to the constellation of The Great Bear. Also known as NGC 2537, it is an irregular dwarf galaxy. Residing at a distance of about 20 million light years, it has an apparent magnitude of 12.3.
There is also a very unique globular cluster in Lynx, named NGC 2419. Unlike all the other globular clusters that surround our galaxy in a spherical cloud extending out to about 65,000 light years, NGC 2419 is all by itself, floating in intergalactic space about 250,000 light years away. Because it is so far outside the bounds of our galaxy, it is known as The Intergalactic Wanderer, and sometimes classified as an extragalactic object. It does, however, appear to be gravitationally bound to our Milky Way galaxy, although the very great size of its elliptical orbit means it takes about 3 billion years to complete one trip around the galactic centre. Despite its great distance, NGC 2419 has an apparent magnitude of 9.06, and readily accessible to small telescopes.
So far, five stars in the constellation Lynx have been found to support planetary systems. One of these stars, named 6 LYN, is bright enough to see with the naked eye, with a magnitude of 5.86, shown in the image below. For more information on the extrasolar planets in Lynx, go to http://planetquest.jpl.nasa.gov/index.cfm.
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