Dorado

When and where to look for Dorado

Dorado crosses the meridian — its highest point in the sky — at local midnight around December, which makes the months from November to January the easiest time to find it in the evening. It spans declinations -65.7° to -51.5°, so visible from everywhere south of about 24°N.

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

Brightest stars in Dorado

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

What Dorado is made of

The catalogue lists 30 stars within Dorado, of which 30 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 Zet Dor at 38 light years. The most distant is HD 31754 at roughly 1,195 light years — stars that appear side by side here are nothing of the sort.

Deep-sky objects in Dorado

• Large Magellanic Cloud — galaxy

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