Corona Austrina

When and where to look for Corona Austrina

Corona Austrina crosses the meridian — its highest point in the sky — at local midnight around June, which makes the months from May to July the easiest time to find it in the evening. It spans declinations -43.4° to -37.1°, so visible from everywhere south of about 47°N.

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

Brightest stars in Corona Austrina

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

What Corona Austrina is made of

The catalogue lists 45 stars within Corona Austrina, 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 HD 177565 at 55.3 light years. The most distant is HD 168357 at roughly 1,599 light years — stars that appear side by side here are nothing of the sort.