← Back to dex
Uncommon variable star 23 EP

HIP 74739

RA 229.1187° · Dec 16.4444° · star

Loading sky survey…
🌌 View in 3D star map
Tonight’s visibility

Computing the sky for your location…

Score breakdown

· 4 badges
23 pts · Uncommon
Uncommon 34 pts → Rare
  • Strongly variable +10
  • Variable star +5
  • White A-type star +5
  • A named variable star +3
Total score 23

11 more points to reach Rare.

Badges

  • Variable star · +5
  • White A-type star · +5
  • Strongly variable · +10
  • A named variable star · +3

Trivia

Hard to believe

  • True brightness. It pours out about 96.4 thousand times as much light as the Sun. It only looks ordinary because it is so far away.

What it actually is

  • Spectral class. Its spectrum reads A9.5 — an A-type star: white-hot, typically about twice the Sun's mass, and the class most of the sky's famous bright stars belong to.
  • It changes. This star does not hold still: its brightness rises and falls on a rhythm of hours, days or years, either pulsing in size or being eclipsed by a companion.

Find it in the sky

  • How to spot it. At magnitude 12.4 it is far too faint for the eye: this one belongs to cameras and long exposures, over in Serpens.
  • Northern sky. It rides the northern half of the sky — an easier target the further north you are.
  • Best time of year. It stands highest in the middle of the night around May — that's when to go looking.

What's in a name

  • Its catalogue. The HIP number comes from Hipparcos, the ESA satellite that between 1989 and 1993 pinned down 118,000 stars precisely enough to triangulate their distances.

How we came to know it

  • Cosmic yardstick. Variable stars are how we measured the universe. In 1912 Henrietta Leavitt showed that a pulsating star's rhythm reveals its true brightness — turning these stars into distance markers.

Properties

absmag
-7.63
constellation
Ser
luminosity
98174.7943
mag
12.37
name
HIP 74739
spect
A9.5
var amplitude
1.53
var designation
BF
var max
11.225
var min
12.755

About HIP 74739

HIP 74739 is an uncommon variable star. It sits in the constellation Ser, shines at apparent magnitude 12.37 and has spectral type A9.5.

Its spectrum reads A9.5 — an A-type star: white-hot, typically about twice the Sun's mass, and the class most of the sky's famous bright stars belong to.

How to see it

Look for HIP 74739 in the constellation Ser. At apparent magnitude 12.37, it takes a larger telescope or a long-exposure image to capture.

Like any astronomical target, HIP 74739 is best seen from a dark site away from city lights, and when it is above the horizon depends on your latitude and the time of year. The visibility panel above works out tonight's viewing window for your saved location.

Why HIP 74739 is an uncommon variable star

HIP 74739 scores 23 points on Spacedle's rarity scale, which places it in the uncommon tier. Another 11 points would lift it into a rarer tier.

That score comes from 4 science badges — Variable star, White A-type star, Strongly variable and A named variable star — each earned for a real, measurable property of the object. Rarity on Spacedle is never random: the more remarkable an object's astrophysics, the more badges it collects, the higher it scores, and the rarer it ranks.