Serpens

When and where to look for Serpens

Serpens crosses the meridian — its highest point in the sky — at local midnight around June, which makes the months from May to July the easiest time to find it in the evening. It spans declinations -15.7° to +19.7°, so best from the northern hemisphere; it rises for observers between about 70°S and 74°N.

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

Brightest stars in Serpens

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

What Serpens is made of

The catalogue lists 113 stars within Serpens, of which 113 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 41Gam Ser at 36.7 light years. The most distant is HD 142763 at roughly 1,599 light years — stars that appear side by side here are nothing of the sort.