Virgo

When and where to look for Virgo

Virgo crosses the meridian — its highest point in the sky — at local midnight around April, which makes the months from March to May the easiest time to find it in the evening. It spans declinations -11.2° to +11.0°, so best from the southern hemisphere; it rises for observers between about 79°S and 79°N.

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

Brightest stars in Virgo

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

What Virgo is made of

The catalogue lists 171 stars within Virgo, of which 171 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 61 Vir at 27.9 light years. The most distant is HD 132933 at roughly 2,297 light years — stars that appear side by side here are nothing of the sort.