Sirius
Star
The brightest star in the night sky, both for its own strong light and because it is one of our closest neighbours.
Can you see it tonight?
Where are you?
To work out whether you can see this tonight, we need to know roughly where you are looking from. Your position stays in your browser: it is never sent to us, never stored and never shared.
Without it, everything else on this page still holds: what this object is, where it sits on the sky, and where every fact came from.
What it looks like
No photograph here. Sirius is bright enough to overwhelm the camera that took these pictures, which was built to record very faint things. What comes back is a blaze of light from the instrument rather than a picture of the star.
Where we draw that brightness line is our own judgement, not a published standard.
- Position
- 101.28710, -16.71610Source: Yale Bright Star Catalogue
- Distance
- about 8.7 light yearsSource: Yale Bright Star Catalogue parallax
- Brightness
- about -1.46Source: Yale Bright Star Catalogue
- Spectral class
- A1Vm
- Surface temperature
- about 8,500 KWorked out by us from the spectral class
- Constellation
- Canis MajorSource: Yale Bright Star Catalogue
Catalogue designations
HR2491
Source: Yale Bright Star Catalogue HR number