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This page describes an image Crater Constellation Map

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Diagram caption: The constellation Crater with its bright stars and surrounding constellations. Crater is surrounded by (going clockwise from the top): Leo, Sextans, Hydra, Corvus and Virgo.

Crater is a southern constellation so the whole of the cluster is visible at some point in the year from the whole of the southern hemisphere.The whole constellation is also visible from temperate and equatorial regions of the northern hemisphere. The constellation is best viewed in the evening in the northern hemisphere spring and southern hemisphere autumn.

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. The blue line at the top left of the diagram marks the ecliptic. Neither the constellation boundaries, nor the line marking the ecliptic, 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

Diagram license: Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) icons

Related glossary terms: Apparent Magnitude , Celestial Coordinates , Constellation , Declination , Right Ascension (RA)
Categories: Naked Eye Astronomy

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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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