Leo Minor
LMi · genitive Leonis Minoris · northern sky
At a glance
- Catalogued stars
- 37
- Visible to the eye
- 37 stars
- Brightest star
- Praecipua (3.79)
- Best seen
- February
- Declination span
- +33.8° to +36.7°
- Nearest star
- 11 LMi · 37.1 ly
Visible from everywhere north of about 53°S.
When and where to look for Leo Minor
Leo Minor crosses the meridian — its highest point in the sky — at local midnight around February, which makes the months from January to March the easiest time to find it in the evening. It spans declinations +33.8° to +36.7°, so visible from everywhere north of about 53°S.
The quickest way to find it is to open the live AR sky map and point your phone at the sky — if Leo Minor is above your horizon right now, its figure is drawn in the position it genuinely occupies above you.
Brightest stars in Leo Minor
| Star | Mag | Type | Distance |
|---|---|---|---|
| Praecipua46 LMi | 3.79 | K0III-IV | 94.9 ly |
| 31Bet LMi | 4.20 | G8III-IV | 153.9 ly |
| 21 LMi | 4.49 | A7V | 92.1 ly |
| 10 LMi | 4.54 | G8III | 185 ly |
| 37 LMi | 4.68 | G0II | 578.3 ly |
| 30 LMi | 4.72 | F0V | 233.3 ly |
Magnitude runs backwards: lower numbers are brighter, and anything below about 6.5 is beyond the naked eye under a dark sky.
What Leo Minor is made of
The catalogue lists 37 stars within Leo Minor, of which 37 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 11 LMi at 37.1 light years. The most distant is HD 92000 at roughly 1,443 light years — stars that appear side by side here are nothing of the sort.