This page describes an image Capricornus Constellation Map
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Diagram caption:
The constellation Capricornus (commonly called Capricorn) including its bright stars and surrounding constellations. Capricornus is surrounded by (going clockwise from the top) Aquarius, Aquila, Sagittarius, Microscopium and Piscis Austrinus. Capricornus lies on the ecliptic (shown here as a blue line), this is the path the Sun appears to take across the sky over the course of a year. The Sun is in Capricornus from mid January to mid February. The other planets of the Solar System can often be found in Capricornus.
Capricornus lies just south of the celestial equator and is visible to all observers south of the Arctic Circle. Capricornus is most visible in the evenings in the northern hemisphere autumn and southern hemisphere spring.
In the south east (lower left on this diagram) of the constellation one can find the globular cluster M30 (shown here as a yellow circle with a plus sign superimposed on it).
The y-axis of this diagram is in degrees of declination and with north as up and the x-axis is in hours of right ascension with east to the left. The sizes of the stars marked here relate to the star's apparent magnitude, a measure of its apparent brightness. The larger dots represent brighter stars. The Greek letters mark the brightest stars in the constellation. These are ranked by brightness with the brightest star being labeled alpha, the second brightest beta, etc., although this ordering is not always followed exactly. The dotted boundary lines mark the IAU's boundaries of the constellations and the solid green lines mark one of the common forms used to represent the figures of the constellations. Neither the constellation boundaries, nor the lines joining the stars appear on the sky.
Diagram credit: Adapted by the IAU Office of Astronomy for Education from the original by IAU/Sky & Telescope. Credit Link
Related glossary terms:
Apparent Magnitude
, Aquarius
, Capricornus
, Celestial Coordinates
, Constellation
, Ecliptic
, Globular Cluster
, Sagittarius
, Tropic of Capricorn
Diagram license: Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) icons
The diagram captions presented on the OAE website were written, translated and reviewed by a collective effort from the OAE, the OAE Centers and Nodes, the OAE National Astronomy Education Coordinators (NAECs) and other volunteers. You can find a full list of credits for our translation project here. All media file captions are released under a Creative Commons CC BY-4.0 license and should be credited to "IAU OAE". The media files themselves may have different licenses (see above) and should be credited as listed above under "credit".
