Reticulum
Ret · genitive Reticuli · southern sky
At a glance
- Catalogued stars
- 23
- Visible to the eye
- 23 stars
- Brightest star
- Alp Ret (3.33)
- Best seen
- November
- Declination span
- -64.8° to -59.3°
- Nearest star
- Zet1Ret · 39.2 ly
Visible from everywhere south of about 25°N.
When and where to look for Reticulum
Reticulum crosses the meridian — its highest point in the sky — at local midnight around November, which makes the months from October to December the easiest time to find it in the evening. It spans declinations -64.8° to -59.3°, so visible from everywhere south of about 25°N.
The quickest way to find it is to open the live AR sky map and point your phone at the sky — if Reticulum is above your horizon right now, its figure is drawn in the position it genuinely occupies above you.
Brightest stars in Reticulum
| Star | Mag | Type | Distance |
|---|---|---|---|
| Alp Ret | 3.33 | G7III | 161.6 ly |
| Bet Ret | 3.84 | K0IV SB | 97.4 ly |
| Eps Ret | 4.44 | K2IV | 59.5 ly |
| Gam Ret | 4.48 | M4III | 469.3 ly |
| Del Ret | 4.56 | M2III | 526.1 ly |
| Kap Ret | 4.71 | F5IV-V | 70.7 ly |
Magnitude runs backwards: lower numbers are brighter, and anything below about 6.5 is beyond the naked eye under a dark sky.
What Reticulum is made of
The catalogue lists 23 stars within Reticulum, of which 23 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 Zet1Ret at 39.2 light years. The most distant is HD 22252 at roughly 867 light years — stars that appear side by side here are nothing of the sort.