Mensa

When and where to look for Mensa

Mensa 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 -76.3° to -71.3°, so visible from everywhere south of about 14°N.

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

Brightest stars in Mensa

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

What Mensa is made of

The catalogue lists 23 stars within Mensa, of which 23 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 Alp Men at 33.3 light years. The most distant is HD 37993 at roughly 1,087 light years — stars that appear side by side here are nothing of the sort.