In Star Trek:The Next Generation episode "Future Imperfect", the Fornax Disaster was a situation in which a colony was threatened by the star going nova. In an illusion created by Barash - a lonely young alien who trapped William T. Riker in a complex holographic fantasy - the USS Enterprise-D, under Riker's command, arrived in time to save all the colonists. Jean-Luc Riker, Will's imaginary son, claimed to have been asked about this incident in school by his teacher, Mr. Greenburg, but he did not know the exact stardate
The real-life Fornax is actually a southern constellation. It has been described as being being "on Earth's doorstep", because its main star, Alpha Fornacis, is only about 46 light-years away.
The Hubble Ultra Deep Field is located within Fornax. At a meeting of the Royal Astronomical Society in Britain, a team from University of Queensland described 40 unknown "dwarf" galaxies in this constellation. Follow-up observations with the Hubble Space Telescope and the European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope revealed that Ultra Compact Dwarfs are much smaller than previously known dwarf galaxies, about 120 light-years across. The Fornax Cluster, a small cluster of galaxies lies primarily in the constellation.
The Fornax Cluster