Lacerta

When and where to look for Lacerta

Lacerta crosses the meridian — its highest point in the sky — at local midnight around August, which makes the months from July to September the easiest time to find it in the evening. It spans declinations +37.7° to +52.2°, so visible from everywhere north of about 38°S.

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

Brightest stars in Lacerta

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

What Lacerta is made of

The catalogue lists 68 stars within Lacerta, of which 68 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 7Alp Lac at 102.6 light years. The most distant is HD 215242 at roughly 2,528 light years — stars that appear side by side here are nothing of the sort.