Sagittarius

When and where to look for Sagittarius

Sagittarius crosses the meridian — its highest point in the sky — at local midnight around July, which makes the months from June to August the easiest time to find it in the evening. It spans declinations -44.5° to -16.0°, so visible from everywhere south of about 46°N.

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

Brightest stars in Sagittarius

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

What Sagittarius is made of

The catalogue lists 195 stars within Sagittarius, of which 195 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 191408 at 19.6 light years. The most distant is 6 Sgr at roughly 2,630 light years — stars that appear side by side here are nothing of the sort.

Deep-sky objects in Sagittarius

• Lagoon Nebula — nebula
• Sagittarius Star Cloud — star cloud
• Sagittarius Cluster — globular cluster

These are marked on the sky map, so you can see where they sit relative to the constellation figure in real time.