Taurus

When and where to look for Taurus

Taurus crosses the meridian — its highest point in the sky — at local midnight around November, which makes the months from October to December the easiest time to find it in the evening. It spans declinations +0.4° to +28.6°, so visible from everywhere north of about 61°S.

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

Brightest stars in Taurus

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

What Taurus is made of

The catalogue lists 223 stars within Taurus, of which 223 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 10 Tau at 45.5 light years. The most distant is HD 36408 at roughly 2,992 light years — stars that appear side by side here are nothing of the sort.

Deep-sky objects in Taurus

• Pleiades — open cluster
• Hyades — open cluster

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