Aquarius

When and where to look for Aquarius

Aquarius crosses the meridian — its highest point in the sky — at local midnight around August, which makes the months from July to September the easiest time to find it in the evening. It spans declinations -21.2° to +1.4°, so best from the southern hemisphere; it rises for observers between about 89°S and 69°N.

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

Brightest stars in Aquarius

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

What Aquarius is made of

The catalogue lists 175 stars within Aquarius, of which 175 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 53 Aqr at 65.9 light years. The most distant is 35 Aqr at roughly 2,330 light years — stars that appear side by side here are nothing of the sort.