Norma
Nor · genitive Normae · southern sky
At a glance
- Catalogued stars
- 44
- Visible to the eye
- 44 stars
- Brightest star
- Gam2Nor (4.01)
- Best seen
- May
- Declination span
- -50.2° to -45.2°
- Nearest star
- HD 139211 · 100.9 ly
Visible from everywhere south of about 40°N.
When and where to look for Norma
Norma crosses the meridian — its highest point in the sky — at local midnight around May, which makes the months from April to June the easiest time to find it in the evening. It spans declinations -50.2° to -45.2°, so visible from everywhere south of about 40°N.
The quickest way to find it is to open the live AR sky map and point your phone at the sky — if Norma is above your horizon right now, its figure is drawn in the position it genuinely occupies above you.
Brightest stars in Norma
| Star | Mag | Type | Distance |
|---|---|---|---|
| Gam2Nor | 4.01 | G8III | 128.8 ly |
| Eps Nor | 4.46 | B4V | 530.3 ly |
| Iot1Nor | 4.63 | A7IV | 128.5 ly |
| Eta Nor | 4.65 | G8III | 219.5 ly |
| Del Nor | 4.73 | Am | 122.3 ly |
| Mu Nor | 4.86 | B0Ia | — |
Magnitude runs backwards: lower numbers are brighter, and anything below about 6.5 is beyond the naked eye under a dark sky.
What Norma is made of
The catalogue lists 44 stars within Norma, of which 44 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 HD 139211 at 100.9 light years. The most distant is HD 143548 at roughly 2,652 light years — stars that appear side by side here are nothing of the sort.