Right Ascension to Degrees Converter

About this calculator

Right ascension (RA) is the celestial equivalent of longitude, used in the equatorial coordinate system to locate stars and deep-sky objects. Astronomers traditionally express it in hours, minutes and seconds (since the full 360° circle corresponds to the 24-hour rotation of the sky), which means 1 hour of RA equals exactly 15 degrees (360° ÷ 24h) — the conversion this calculator performs, along with the proportional scaling of minutes and seconds.

Converting RA into decimal degrees is a routine step whenever you need to feed coordinates into telescope-pointing software, plate-solving tools, or any calculation (like angular separation between two objects) that requires both RA and declination expressed in the same degree-based units.