Atlas · Stars
The stars round the Sun
First the Sun’s nearest neighbours, then every star bright enough to see without a telescope. Each one is at its measured distance. Nothing on this page is a model.
Drawing I
Within 20 light years
The 108 stars in the catalogue that lie within 20 light years of the Sun, seen from above the disc of the Milky Way. Stars that go round each other share a dot.
A bigger dot is a star that gives out more light. Most of these are red dwarfs, far too faint to see by eye, and that is what most stars everywhere are like.
The drawing is 42 light years across. On this scale the whole Solar System out to Neptune would be about a fortieth of the width of one of the dotted lines.
Drawing II
Every star you can see
All 4,940 stars of magnitude 6 or brighter: the ones a good eye can pick out under a dark sky, from anywhere on the Earth. Seen from above, with the Sun in the middle.
Half of them are within 350 light years, and 90 in every 100 are within 1,000. The few far ones are giants, thousands of times brighter than the Sun.
The further a star, the less sure its distance. Beyond about 1,000 light years many of these distances are rough, so a far dot may really belong some way nearer or further along its line from the Sun.
The drawing is 5,000 light years across. 38 stars lie outside it, the furthest given as 3,200 light years away.
Drawing III
The same stars from the side
Turn drawing II on its edge. The centre of the Milky Way is now off to the right and the galaxy’s north is up. The pale band marks 1,000 light years either side of the Sun, which is about the depth of the layer that holds most of the Milky Way’s stars.
Close in, the stars lie in every direction. Further out they keep to the disc, because that is where the galaxy’s bright young stars are.
How to read it
In drawings I and II you are looking straight down on the disc of the Milky Way from its north side. The Sun is the ring in the middle and the centre of the galaxy is far off the top of the page. Distances from the Sun are to scale, and the dotted rings mark equal distances.
A flat drawing cannot show height. Two stars side by side on the page may be one well above the disc and one well below, so the list gives each star’s height as well as its distance.
The dots are far too big. On drawing I a star the size of the Sun, drawn to scale, would be about a 300-millionth of the width of the page.
A light year is how far light travels in a year: 9.46 trillion km. Magnitude is the astronomer’s scale of brightness in the sky, on which smaller numbers are brighter and 6 is about the faintest the eye can see.
The nearest stars
The 37 stars within 20 light years that have a name of their own in the catalogue, nearest first. The other 71 are known only by catalogue numbers.
| Star | Distance | Height above the disc | Light it gives out |
|---|---|---|---|
| Proxima Centauri | 4.22 light years | 0.1 light years below | less than 1/1,000 of the Sun |
| Rigil Kentaurusshown as Alpha Centauri | 4.32 light years | 0.1 light years below | 1.5 times the Sun |
| Toliman | 4.32 light years | 0.1 light years below | 1/2.3 of the Sun |
| Barnard's Star | 5.94 light years | 1.4 light years above | less than 1/1,000 of the Sun |
| Wolf 359 | 7.80 light years | 6.5 light years above | less than 1/1,000 of the Sun |
| Lalande 21185 | 8.30 light years | 7.5 light years above | 1/180 of the Sun |
| Sirius | 8.60 light years | 1.3 light years below | 22 times the Sun |
| Ross 154 | 9.69 light years | 1.7 light years below | less than 1/1,000 of the Sun |
| Ross 248 | 10.32 light years | 3.0 light years below | less than 1/1,000 of the Sun |
| Ranshown as Epsilon Eridani | 10.49 light years | 7.8 light years below | 1/3.5 of the Sun |
| Lacaille 9352 | 10.69 light years | 9.8 light years below | 1/95 of the Sun |
| Ross 128 | 10.94 light years | 9.4 light years above | less than 1/1,000 of the Sun |
| EZ Aqr | 11.07 light years | 9.3 light years below | less than 1/1,000 of the Sun |
| Struve 2398 B | 11.26 light years | 4.6 light years above | 1/740 of the Sun |
| 61 Cygni A | 11.37 light years | 1.1 light years below | 1/12 of the Sun |
| 61 Cygni B | 11.41 light years | 1.2 light years below | 1/25 of the Sun |
| Procyon | 11.46 light years | 2.6 light years above | 7.3 times the Sun |
| Struve 2398 Ashown as Struve 2398 | 11.64 light years | 4.8 light years above | 1/350 of the Sun |
| Groombridge 34 | 11.70 light years | 3.7 light years below | 1/160 of the Sun |
| Epsilon Indi | 11.82 light years | 8.8 light years below | 1/6.7 of the Sun |
| Tau Ceti | 11.90 light years | 11.4 light years below | 1/2.2 of the Sun |
| Luyten's Star | 12.41 light years | 2.2 light years above | 1/700 of the Sun |
| Kapteyn's Star | 12.77 light years | 7.5 light years below | 1/270 of the Sun |
| Lacaille 8760 | 12.87 light years | 9.0 light years below | 1/36 of the Sun |
| Kruger 60 | 13.05 light years | 0.0 light years above | 1/500 of the Sun |
| Ross 614 | 13.46 light years | 1.4 light years below | less than 1/1,000 of the Sun |
| Van Maanen's Star | 13.90 light years | 11.7 light years below | less than 1/1,000 of the Sun |
| Wolf 1061 | 14.00 light years | 5.6 light years above | 1/700 of the Sun |
| Keidshown as 40 Eridani | 16.26 light years | 10.0 light years below | 1/2.8 of the Sun |
| 70 Ophiuchi | 16.58 light years | 3.3 light years above | 1/1.9 of the Sun |
| Altair | 16.72 light years | 2.6 light years below | 11 times the Sun |
| Alsafishown as Sigma Draconis | 18.77 light years | 7.0 light years above | 1/2.6 of the Sun |
| Guniibuushown as 36 Ophiuchi | 19.35 light years | 2.3 light years above | 1/1.8 of the Sun |
| Achirdshown as Eta Cassiopeiae | 19.42 light years | 1.7 light years below | 1.2 times the Sun |
| Guniibuu B | 19.52 light years | 2.3 light years above | 1/3.5 of the Sun |
| 82 G. Eri | 19.72 light years | 16.4 light years below | 1/1.6 of the Sun |
| Delta Pavonis | 19.92 light years | 10.7 light years below | 1.2 times the Sun |
Where this comes from
- HYG star database v4.4, David Nash, shared under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 licence. The drawings here are made from it and are shared under the same licence.
The catalogue joins the Hipparcos, Yale Bright Star and Gliese catalogues. Distances come from parallax: the tiny shift in a star’s place in the sky as the Earth goes round the Sun. It does not hold every faint star near the Sun, so a full census within 20 light years would show more red and brown dwarfs than are drawn here.
The light a star gives out is its visible light only, compared with the Sun’s, worked out here from its brightness in the sky and its distance. Red dwarfs give out most of their light as infrared, which this leaves out.
“Above” and “below” are measured from the plane through the Sun parallel to the Milky Way’s disc. The Sun itself sits about 70 light years above the true middle of the disc (Bennett and Bovy 2019). The band in drawing III follows the measured thickness of the disc’s main layer of stars, which thins out over about 300 parsecs, or 1,000 light years (Jurić and others 2008).