Scorpius

When and where to look for Scorpius

Scorpius 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 -43.2° to -19.8°, so visible from everywhere south of about 47°N.

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

Brightest stars in Scorpius

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

What Scorpius is made of

The catalogue lists 172 stars within Scorpius, of which 172 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 156384 at 22.3 light years. The most distant is HD 152235 at roughly 3,106 light years — stars that appear side by side here are nothing of the sort.

Deep-sky objects in Scorpius

• Ptolemy Cluster — open cluster
• Butterfly Cluster — open cluster

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