Canis Minor
CMi · genitive Canis Minoris · equatorial sky
At a glance
- Catalogued stars
- 47
- Visible to the eye
- 47 stars
- Brightest star
- Procyon (0.34)
- Best seen
- January
- Declination span
- +5.2° to +8.3°
- Nearest star
- Procyon · 11.5 ly
Visible from everywhere north of about 82°S.
When and where to look for Canis Minor
Canis Minor crosses the meridian — its highest point in the sky — at local midnight around January, which makes the months from December to February the easiest time to find it in the evening. It spans declinations +5.2° to +8.3°, so visible from everywhere north of about 82°S.
The quickest way to find it is to open the live AR sky map and point your phone at the sky — if Canis Minor is above your horizon right now, its figure is drawn in the position it genuinely occupies above you.
Brightest stars in Canis Minor
| Star | Mag | Type | Distance |
|---|---|---|---|
| ProcyonAlpha Canis Minoris | 0.34 | F5V | 11.5 ly |
| Gomeisa3Bet CMi | 2.89 | B8Vvar | 161.7 ly |
| 4Gam CMi | 4.33 | K3III SB | 318.2 ly |
| HD 66141 | 4.39 | K2III | 254 ly |
| 6 CMi | 4.55 | K2III | 572.2 ly |
| 2Eps CMi | 4.99 | G8III | 1,042 ly |
Magnitude runs backwards: lower numbers are brighter, and anything below about 6.5 is beyond the naked eye under a dark sky.
What Canis Minor is made of
The catalogue lists 47 stars within Canis Minor, of which 47 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 Procyon at 11.5 light years. The most distant is HD 57608 at roughly 1,631 light years — stars that appear side by side here are nothing of the sort.