August / September (Usually visible from northern latitudes)
The deep red Garnet Star shines out from the northern clouds of the Elephant's Trunk Nebula, IC 1396 in southern Cepheus. Within the nebula is a broad open cluster of stars, Trumpler 37 or Collinder 439, and the Garnet Star is sometimes listed as being a member of, or at least associated with, this cluster. Imagery provided by Aladin sky atlas
* The Garnet Star appears to be a very distant object, and because of this, its parallax angle of just 0.1190 milli-arcseconds is too small to extrapolate a reliable value for its distance. Ignoring other considerations, this parallax figure would yield a distance of more than 27,000 light years, but this result is too extreme to be realistic. Using other methods to calculate the star's distance, the most likely results converge on a value of a little more than three thousand light years, though there is considerable margin for error in this result. Other calculation methods suggest that the star may be closer than this to the Sun, perhaps by a matter of several hundred light years.
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