Piscis Austrinus
PsA · genitive Piscis Austrini · southern sky
At a glance
- Catalogued stars
- 46
- Visible to the eye
- 46 stars
- Brightest star
- Fomalhaut (1.16)
- Best seen
- August
- Declination span
- -33.0° to -27.0°
- Nearest star
- HD 216803 · 24.8 ly
Visible from everywhere south of about 57°N.
When and where to look for Piscis Austrinus
Piscis Austrinus 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 -33.0° to -27.0°, so visible from everywhere south of about 57°N.
The quickest way to find it is to open the live AR sky map and point your phone at the sky — if Piscis Austrinus is above your horizon right now, its figure is drawn in the position it genuinely occupies above you.
Brightest stars in Piscis Austrinus
| Star | Mag | Type | Distance |
|---|---|---|---|
| FomalhautAlpha Piscis Austrini | 1.16 | A4V | 25.1 ly |
| 18Eps PsA | 4.18 | B8V | 486.8 ly |
| 23Del PsA | 4.20 | G8III | 154.1 ly |
| 17Bet PsA | 4.29 | A1V | 142.8 ly |
| 9Iot PsA | 4.35 | B9.5V | 204.2 ly |
| 22Gam PsA | 4.46 | A0III | 215.4 ly |
Magnitude runs backwards: lower numbers are brighter, and anything below about 6.5 is beyond the naked eye under a dark sky.
What Piscis Austrinus is made of
The catalogue lists 46 stars within Piscis Austrinus, of which 46 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 216803 at 24.8 light years. The most distant is 13 PsA at roughly 2,077 light years — stars that appear side by side here are nothing of the sort.