Tucana

When and where to look for Tucana

Tucana crosses the meridian — its highest point in the sky — at local midnight around September, which makes the months from August to October the easiest time to find it in the evening. It spans declinations -65.6° to -58.2°, so visible from everywhere south of about 24°N.

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

Brightest stars in Tucana

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

What Tucana is made of

The catalogue lists 45 stars within Tucana, of which 45 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 Zet Tuc at 28 light years. The most distant is HD 211726 at roughly 1,165 light years — stars that appear side by side here are nothing of the sort.

Deep-sky objects in Tucana

• Small Magellanic Cloud — galaxy
• 47 Tucanae — globular cluster

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