Aquila

When and where to look for Aquila

Aquila crosses the meridian — its highest point in the sky — at local midnight around July, which makes the months from June to August the easiest time to find it in the evening. It spans declinations -4.9° to +13.9°, so best from the northern hemisphere; it rises for observers between about 76°S and 85°N.

The quickest way to find it is to open the live AR sky map and point your phone at the sky — if Aquila is above your horizon right now, its figure is drawn in the position it genuinely occupies above you.

Brightest stars in Aquila

Magnitude runs backwards: lower numbers are brighter, and anything below about 6.5 is beyond the naked eye under a dark sky.

What Aquila is made of

The catalogue lists 127 stars within Aquila, of which 127 are magnitude 6.5 or brighter — the limit of what an unaided eye picks up under a genuinely dark sky. The rest need binoculars or a telescope.

Spectral make-up

Spectral class is a temperature ordering, running from O at around 30,000 K down to M below 3,500 K. A constellation is a direction, not a group, so this is simply what happens to lie along that line of sight.

The closest catalogued star in this direction is Altair at 16.7 light years. The most distant is 32Nu Aql at roughly 2,836 light years — stars that appear side by side here are nothing of the sort.