Scutum

When and where to look for Scutum

Scutum 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 -14.6° to -4.7°, so visible from everywhere south of about 75°N.

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

Brightest stars in Scutum

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

What Scutum is made of

The catalogue lists 32 stars within Scutum, of which 32 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 Sct at 199.1 light years. The most distant is HD 170975 at roughly 2,886 light years — stars that appear side by side here are nothing of the sort.

Deep-sky objects in Scutum

• Wild Duck Cluster — open cluster

These are marked on the sky map, so you can see where they sit relative to the constellation figure in real time.