Open cluster
Sagittarius Star Cloud (M24)
In Sagittarius (Sgr) • Magnitude 4.5 • 2.0 degrees
Open the free AstroPlanner with Sagittarius Star Cloud pre-selected, scored against your telescope, location, and the live cloud forecast.
Not a true cluster but a rare "window" through the Milky Way's dust where we can glimpse stars 10,000–16,000 light-years away — the single largest naked-eye concentration of individual stars in the entire sky. A single binocular field here contains tens of thousands of stars belonging to the Milky Way's inner regions.
Sagittarius Star Cloud at a glance
| Catalog IDs | M24 |
| Type | Open cluster |
| Constellation | Sagittarius (Sgr) |
| Right ascension | 18h 16m 55s |
| Declination | -18° 33' 00" |
| Apparent magnitude | 4.50 |
| Angular size | 120.0 × 40.0 arcmin |
| Max altitude at 45°N | 26° |
| Best imaging months | Mar, Apr, May |
How to image Sagittarius Star Cloud
Sagittarius Star Cloud sits in the constellation Sagittarius at right ascension 18h 16m 55s and declination -18° 33' 00". To frame and integrate it well, AstroPlanner will compute the optimal moonless window for tonight from your location, the field-of-view fit against your sensor and focal length, the suggested total integration time given your aperture and sky Bortle class, and a cloud-aware schedule that drops it from the plan if your nearest cloud forecast spike overlaps the best altitude window.