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Orion's Belt is the pointer. Find the three stars in a short straight row — Alnitak, Alnilam, Mintaka — and extend that line up and to the right (northwest). It lands directly on Aldebaran and the Hyades V. Keep going the same distance again and you reach the Pleiades.

Taurus is best seen around 9 p.m. in January, visible from November through March in the evening sky. It is not circumpolar from 40°N: it rises in the northeast on autumn evenings, stands high in the south around midnight in December, and sets in the west by spring.

Star	RA	Dec	Mag	Spectral type	Distance	Name
Aldebaran (α Tau)	4h 35.9m	+16° 30.6′	0.85	K5 III (red giant)	~65 ly	Arabic al-dabarān, "the follower" — it trails the Pleiades across the sky.
Elnath (β Tau)	5h 26.3m	+28° 36.6′	1.65	B7 III (blue-white giant)	~130 ly	Arabic al-nāṭiḥ, "the butting one" — the horn tip. Shared with Auriga as γ Aurigae until the boundaries were fixed in 1930.
ζ Tau	5h 37.6m	+21° 08.4′	3.00	B4 III	—	Marks the tip of the southern horn, close in the sky to the Crab Nebula.
Prima Hyadum (γ Tau)	4h 19.8m	+15° 37.8′	3.65	K0 III	—	Latin, "first of the Hyades" — the point of the V.
Hyadum II (δ Tau)	4h 22.9m	+17° 32.4′	3.76	K0 III	—	Latin, "second of the Hyades."
Ain (ε Tau)	4h 28.6m	+19° 10.8′	3.53	K0 III	—	Arabic al-ʿayn, "the eye" — the bull's other eye, opposite Aldebaran.
λ Tau	4h 00.7m	+12° 29.4′	3.47 (var.)	B3 V + A4 IV	~370 ly	An Algol-type eclipsing binary: the fainter star periodically passes in front of the brighter one and the combined light measurably dims.
Alcyone (η Tau)	3h 47.5m	+24° 06.6′	2.87	B7 III	~440 ly	Greek, the eldest of the seven Pleiades sisters — the cluster's brightest star.

Aldebaran is not a member of the Hyades. It only looks like the eye of the V because it happens to sit almost exactly along our line of sight to the cluster; the Hyades themselves are roughly 150 light-years out, Aldebaran is less than half that distance, and the two have no physical connection. It is one of the sky's better-known optical coincidences.

The Mesopotamian and Greek layers of this figure — the Bull of Heaven that Ishtar sends against Gilgamesh, the bull-shaped Zeus who carries off Europa, the Apis cult, the Mithraic tauroctony — belong to the zodiac sign's page and aren't repeated here. What belongs here is what other skywatching traditions, working independently, made of the same stars.

In China, the Pleiades are the lunar mansion Mao (昴), "the Hairy Head," first of the 28 xiù. Han-era sky lore held that when the cluster's stars flickered it warned of invasion, and the group was read as "the ears and eyes of Heaven," presiding over the close of criminal trials. In Japan the cluster is Subaru, "to unite" — the name and the six-star logo both come directly from it, adopted when five companies merged to form the corporation in 1953, one large star for the parent firm and five smaller ones for its partners.

The Pleiades carry outsized weight for a small cluster nearly everywhere people have looked up. In Aotearoa the first pre-dawn rising of Matariki in late June marks the Māori new year, and Polynesian wayfinders on voyaging canoes used the cluster as a celestial marker for open-ocean navigation. Among the Blackfoot, the cluster is the Lost Boys — orphans neglected by their people who became stars, whose seasonal reappearance signalled hunters to move to the buffalo grounds; the story was recorded from Blackfoot informants by Clark Wissler and D.C. Duvall and published by the American Museum of Natural History in 1908. Cherokee and Onondaga traditions independently tell of seven boys who danced themselves into the sky.

Two questions about the cluster recur across cultures and are still open. First, why "seven" sisters when most people under typical skies can pick out only six with the naked eye: candidate explanations range from simple eyesight and light pollution to the idea that Pleione, the faintest of the traditionally named seven, may have varied in brightness since antiquity — it is a known "shell star" that sheds gas and dims irregularly, but no one has shown that this fully explains the ancient count. Second, whether the Pleiades were painted 17,000 years ago: Michael Rappenglück has argued that a cluster of dots above an aurochs figure in the Hall of the Bulls at Lascaux depicts the Pleiades beside Taurus. The claim is contested — critics note there is no way to confirm the painters saw a bull in these stars at all, and pattern-matching a handful of dots to a well-known modern cluster is exactly the kind of claim that is easy to produce and hard to falsify.

The Hyades are the nearest true open star cluster to the Sun, at roughly 150 light-years — only the much looser, gravitationally unbound Ursa Major Moving Group is closer, and most astronomers don't count that as a cluster in the same sense. The V shape is the cluster seen nearly face-on.

The Pleiades (M45), about 440 light-years out, hold well over a thousand stars, six or seven of which are an easy naked-eye catch on a clear night; binoculars turn the smudge into a small field of blue-white suns still wrapped in traces of the nebulosity they formed from.

The Crab Nebula (M1) is the wreck of a star that exploded as supernova SN 1054, recorded independently by Chinese court astronomers and by Japanese observers as a "guest star" bright enough to see in daylight for weeks; it is now roughly 6,500 light-years away and still expanding at about 1,500 km/s. John Bevis found it telescopically in 1731; Charles Messier rediscovered it in 1758 while hunting a comet, mistook it for one, and listed it first in the catalogue he built specifically to stop that mistake — which is why it is M1. The link between the nebula and the 1054 event wasn't made until 1921. Claims that the same event is recorded in North American rock art, notably a star-and-crescent petroglyph at Chaco Canyon, remain contested: the configuration fits the sky on the morning of 5 July 1054, but specialists including Edwin Krupp have found the star-crescent motif recurring too often, in contexts too varied, to read reliably as a supernova record, and by the 2010s most individual candidates had been reassessed and dropped.

Date	Event
c. 15,000–17,000 BCE (contested)	Michael Rappenglück proposes that a Lascaux cave painting depicts Taurus and the Pleiades; the reading is disputed.
1054 CE, 4–5 July	Chinese and Japanese observers record the "guest star" now identified as SN 1054, visible in daylight for weeks and at night for about two years.
1731	John Bevis discovers the Crab Nebula telescopically.
1758	Charles Messier catalogues it as M1, the first entry in his catalogue of comet-like objects.
1921	Astronomers first connect the Crab Nebula's expansion to the 1054 guest star.
1930	The IAU adopts Eugène Delporte's constellation boundaries, fixing Taurus as a defined area of sky rather than just a picture.

• Taurus — the zodiac sign; same name, a different 30 degrees of sky.
• Western Zodiac — the precession that pulled the sign loose from the stars.
• Aries
• Gemini