Pavo

When and where to look for Pavo

Pavo 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 -72.9° to -56.7°, so visible from everywhere south of about 17°N.

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

Brightest stars in Pavo

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

What Pavo is made of

The catalogue lists 87 stars within Pavo, of which 87 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 Del Pav at 19.9 light years. The most distant is Lam Pav at roughly 1,431 light years — stars that appear side by side here are nothing of the sort.