At 97,000km (60,000 miles) across, it’s only around 15% of the size of our Sun, and only slightly larger than Jupiter (71,000km or 44,000 miles). While you’d think a star this ‘close’ would be prominent in our night skies, Wolf-359 is actually so small and faint that it can only be seen through a telescope. Depending on your preferred unit of measurement, the star ‘Wolf-359’ lies just eight light-years away, that’s around 80 trillion kilometres, 50 trillion miles, or 500,000 times the distance between Earth and the Sun! The night sky looking west as darkness falls this month. Leo is also home to one of the closest stars to our Sun, although the distances involved are still staggering. The speed at which it spins - rotating in just 16 hours compared to our Sun’s 25 days - has distorted the star, making it slightly egg-shaped. Regulus is a blue-white star around three times larger than our Sun and more than 250 times as bright. The brightest star in Leo and the heart of the lion is Regulus, which is a system of four stars that lies around 80 light-years away from our Solar System. You can find a map of this patch of sky below. Looking high in the south as darkness falls, you’ll see the pattern of stars that form constellation of Leo the Lion. Zosma (upper-left) forms the back of the lion, with Denebola (far-left) forming the tail. Algieba is the brighter star of the mane, just below double-star Adhafera. Regulus (lower-right) is the heart, Algenubi (upper-right) is the eye. The brighter stars in the constellation of Leo the Lion. Those with binoculars or telescopes can look even further into space and search for galaxies that lie in the spring constellations. May brings a meteor shower, a conjunction of the Moon with Mars and Venus, and a chance to see the core of our Milky Way galaxy.
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