This page describes an image Microscopium Constellation Map
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Diagram caption:
The constellation Microscopium with its brighter stars and surrounding constellations. Microscopium is surrounded by (going clockwise from the top): Capricornus, Sagittarius, Telescopium, Indus, Grus and Piscis Austrinus. Microscopium is a faint constellation with relatively few bright stars.
Microscopium is a southern constellation and thus the whole constellation is visible at some point in the year throughout the southern hemisphere. The whole constellation is also visible in equatorial and some temperate regions of the northern hemisphere with parts of the constellation visible from other northern temperate regions. Microscopium is best viewed in the evening in the northern hemisphere autumn and southern hemisphere spring.
The y-axis of this diagram is in degrees of declination 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 line marking the ecliptic, nor the lines joining the stars appear on the sky. The ecliptic is marked with a blue line in the top right.
Diagram credit: Adapted by the IAU Office of Astronomy for Education from the original by the IAU and Sky & Telescope. Credit Link
Related glossary terms:
Apparent Magnitude
, Capricornus
, Celestial Coordinates
, Constellation
, Declination
, Ecliptic
, Right Ascension (RA)
, Sagittarius
Categories:
Naked Eye Astronomy
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".
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