This page describes an image Musca Constellation Map
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Diagram caption:
The constellation Musca with its bright stars and surrounding constellations. Musca is surrounded by (going clockwise from the top): Crux, Centaurus, Carina, Chamaeleon, Apus and Circinus.
Musca 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 visible to a thin strip of the northern hemisphere near the equator with parts of the constellation visible to other northern equatorial regions. Musca is circumpolar in temperate and antarctic regions of the southern hemisphere. Musca is best viewed in the evening in the northern hemisphere late spring and southern hemisphere late autumn.
The globular clusters NGC 4372 and NGC 4833 lie in Musca and are marked here with yellow circles with plus signs superimposed on them.
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 lines joining the stars appear on the sky.
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
, Celestial Coordinates
, Circumpolar Stars
, Constellation
, Declination
, Right Ascension (RA)
, Southern Cross
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
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