Centaurus

When and where to look for Centaurus

Centaurus crosses the meridian — its highest point in the sky — at local midnight around April, which makes the months from March to May the easiest time to find it in the evening. It spans declinations -60.8° to -36.4°, so visible from everywhere south of about 29°N.

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

Brightest stars in Centaurus

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

What Centaurus is made of

The catalogue lists 284 stars within Centaurus, of which 283 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 Proxima Centauri at 4.2 light years. The most distant is HD 119159 at roughly 2,886 light years — stars that appear side by side here are nothing of the sort.

Deep-sky objects in Centaurus

• Omega Centauri — globular cluster

These are marked on the sky map, so you can see where they sit relative to the constellation figure in real time.