Naked eye & binocular targets

Find the brightest stars of Boötes and Virgo and explore the sky around them

1 Arcturus (Alpha Boötis)

Only 37 light years away, Arcturus is the closest giant star to Earth. With a diameter 25-times greater than our own Sun’s, it shines at magnitude

+0.15 in the sky, making it the brightest star in the Northern Hemisphere – Sirius, the brightest star in the entire sky, is in the Southern Hemisphere, though it is sometimes visible in northern latitudes in winter.

2 Spica (Alpha Virginis)

250 light years away from our Solar System, first-magnitude Spica is a very hot, blue star, more than 2,300-times more luminous than the Sun. The 15th-brightest star in the sky, it's a binary pair that swoop around each other every four days.

3 3 Messier 49

Because it is over 55 million light years away, this eighth-magnitude elliptical galaxy looks like a tiny smudge in binoculars. However, it is one of the brightest members of the sprawling Virgo Cluster of galaxies, and it is huge – more than 160,000 light years across.

4 Sombrero Galaxy (Messier 104)

Photographs taken by the Hubble Space Telescope and other observatories show why Messier 104 is nicknamed the ‘Sombrero Galaxy’, but through your binoculars it will only look like a small, oval smudge. It is 29 million light years away and over 130,000 light years wide.

5 Messier 5

Glowing at magnitude +5.6, M5 is one of the finest globular clusters in the sky, and many observers think it is almost as pretty as the much more famous Messier 13. This enormous ball of at least 100,000 stars can be seen with the naked eye as a fuzzy spot under very dark skies, even though it is 24,000 light years away.