Draco

When and where to look for Draco

Draco 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 +51.5° to +72.7°, so visible from everywhere north of about 17°S.

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

Brightest stars in Draco

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

What Draco is made of

The catalogue lists 217 stars within Draco, of which 217 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 Alsafi at 18.8 light years. The most distant is 45 Dra at roughly 2,118 light years — stars that appear side by side here are nothing of the sort.