Star Stars · In Scorpius
Sargas
Sargas, θ Scorpii, is a yellow-white bright giant in Scorpius: the 42nd brightest star in the night sky.
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- Constellation
- Scorpius
- Designation
- θ Scorpii
- Apparent magnitude
- 1.86 · 42nd brightest star in the night sky
- Spectral class
- F1II
- Distance
- 300 light-years
- Highest at midnight
- mid June
- Position (J2000)
- RA 17h 37m · Dec −43° 00′
A yellow-white bright giant, around 7,400 K, like Procyon. About 72× brighter than the faintest star the eye can see. Gives off about 1,300 times the Sun's visible light. The light you are seeing left around 1726.
When to see it
On the night of Sun 13 Jun 2027, when it is highest around midnight, on each city’s own clock:
| From | Rises | Highest | Sets |
|---|---|---|---|
| London GMT+1 | Never rises | ||
| New York EDT | 22:40 | 01:06 · 6° | 03:32 |
| Singapore GMT+8 | 19:22 | 01:16 · 46° | 07:10 |
| Sydney GMT+10 | 15:34 | 00:07 · 81° | 08:41 |
Common questions
- Can I see it from 50° north?
- No. From there it never rises: you would have to travel south of 47° north before it cleared the horizon at all.
- Can I see it from 35° south?
- Yes, and well placed: at its highest it passes almost overhead, 82° up, above most of the air’s haze.
- When is the best time of year to see it?
- Around mid June, when it stands opposite the Sun and is highest at midnight. It comes round about two hours earlier each month, so by mid September it is highest in the early evening, and in mid March not until the hours before dawn.
- How far away is it, and how bright?
- It is 300 light-years away, and shines at magnitude 1.86 in our sky. From that far, the Sun would be a star of magnitude 9.6: too faint for the eye, a target for binoculars.
- Naked eye, binoculars or telescope?
- The naked eye, even from a city: at magnitude 1.86 it is brighter than the faintest stars a city sky still shows, about magnitude 4.5.
Look for
Start from Shaula: Sargas is 5.9° south of it, three fingers at arm’s length.
Look for
From 50° north it never rises; from 35° north it climbs to 12°; from the equator it climbs to 47°; from 35° south it climbs to 82°.
Science
Sargas’s surface is about 7,400 K, some 1,600 K hotter than the Sun’s 5,772 K, so its light is strongest at about 390 nm, in the ultraviolet, past the violet end of what the eye can see, where the Sun’s is strongest at 500 nm. Moved to 33 light-years, the distance astronomers compare stars at, it would shine at magnitude −3.0, brighter than Sirius, the brightest star in our sky.
Did you know
Against Shaula, the brighter star the hop starts from: the two look about as bright as each other in our sky; Shaula is 571 light-years away and Sargas 300 light-years, so side by side Shaula would give off 4.5 times as much light as Sargas.
Science
Sargas is the 100th nearest to us of the 156 stars on these pages with a measured distance. Its nearest neighbour among them in space is Choo, about 48 light-years from it; on our sky the two are 6.9° apart.
Look for
The Sun passes 20° north of Sargas around mid December, when it is highest at noon, in daylight: the weeks either side are its worst time of year. From 35° north it is above the horizon for about 7 hours a day and from 35° south about 17. It is 6° from the plane of the Milky Way, inside the band a dark sky shows.