Vulpecula

When and where to look for Vulpecula

Vulpecula 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 +21.4° to +27.8°, so visible from everywhere north of about 62°S.

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

Brightest stars in Vulpecula

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

What Vulpecula is made of

The catalogue lists 71 stars within Vulpecula, of which 71 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 182807 at 89.3 light years. The most distant is HD 189671 at roughly 2,609 light years — stars that appear side by side here are nothing of the sort.