Auriga

When and where to look for Auriga

Auriga crosses the meridian — its highest point in the sky — at local midnight around December, which makes the months from November to January the easiest time to find it in the evening. It spans declinations +28.6° to +54.3°, so visible from everywhere north of about 36°S.

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

Brightest stars in Auriga

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

What Auriga is made of

The catalogue lists 157 stars within Auriga, of which 157 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 37394 at 40 light years. The most distant is Almaaz at roughly 2,132 light years — stars that appear side by side here are nothing of the sort.