Canes Venatici
CVn · genitive Canum Venaticorum · northern sky
At a glance
- Catalogued stars
- 61
- Visible to the eye
- 61 stars
- Brightest star
- Cor Caroli (2.89)
- Best seen
- March
- Declination span
- +38.3° to +41.4°
- Nearest star
- Chara · 27.5 ly
Visible from everywhere north of about 49°S.
When and where to look for Canes Venatici
Canes Venatici crosses the meridian — its highest point in the sky — at local midnight around March, which makes the months from February to April the easiest time to find it in the evening. It spans declinations +38.3° to +41.4°, so visible from everywhere north of about 49°S.
The quickest way to find it is to open the live AR sky map and point your phone at the sky — if Canes Venatici is above your horizon right now, its figure is drawn in the position it genuinely occupies above you.
Brightest stars in Canes Venatici
| Star | Mag | Type | Distance |
|---|---|---|---|
| Cor Caroli12Alp2CVn | 2.89 | A0spe... | 114.8 ly |
| Chara8Bet CVn | 4.24 | G0V | 27.5 ly |
| 24 CVn | 4.68 | A5V | 180.3 ly |
| 20 CVn | 4.72 | F3III | 264.3 ly |
| 5 CVn | 4.76 | G7III | 386.4 ly |
| HD 120933 | 4.76 | K5III | 600.7 ly |
Magnitude runs backwards: lower numbers are brighter, and anything below about 6.5 is beyond the naked eye under a dark sky.
What Canes Venatici is made of
The catalogue lists 61 stars within Canes Venatici, of which 61 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 Chara at 27.5 light years. The most distant is HD 114975 at roughly 1,673 light years — stars that appear side by side here are nothing of the sort.