Pictor

When and where to look for Pictor

Pictor 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 -61.9° to -51.1°, so visible from everywhere south of about 28°N.

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

Brightest stars in Pictor

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

What Pictor is made of

The catalogue lists 48 stars within Pictor, of which 48 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 Bet Pic at 63.4 light years. The most distant is Del Pic at roughly 1,299 light years — stars that appear side by side here are nothing of the sort.