Sextans

When and where to look for Sextans

Sextans crosses the meridian — its highest point in the sky — at local midnight around February, which makes the months from January to March the easiest time to find it in the evening. It spans declinations -8.1° to -0.4°, so visible from everywhere south of about 82°N.

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

Brightest stars in Sextans

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

What Sextans is made of

The catalogue lists 39 stars within Sextans, of which 39 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 33 Sex at 120.1 light years. The most distant is HD 90057 at roughly 1,388 light years — stars that appear side by side here are nothing of the sort.