Cygnus

When and where to look for Cygnus

Cygnus 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 +28.0° to +53.4°, so visible from everywhere north of about 37°S.

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

Brightest stars in Cygnus

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

What Cygnus is made of

The catalogue lists 272 stars within Cygnus, of which 272 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 61 Cyg at 11.4 light years. The most distant is 35 Cyg at roughly 3,167 light years — stars that appear side by side here are nothing of the sort.