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Uncommon star 27 EP

HD 156693

RA 260.7798° · Dec -61.7292° · star

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Score breakdown

· 4 badges
27 pts · Uncommon
Uncommon 34 pts → Rare
  • Bright giant +12
  • Distant (over 1,000 light-years) +6
  • Hot blue B-type star +6
  • Star +3
Total score 27

7 more points to reach Rare.

Badges

  • Star · +3
  • Distant (over 1,000 light-years) · +6
  • Hot blue B-type star · +6
  • Bright giant · +12

Trivia

What it actually is

  • Spectral class. Its spectrum reads B9/B9.5II/I — a blue-white B-type star, with a surface tens of thousands of degrees hot and a life measured in tens of millions of years.

Sense of scale

  • In perspective. Far away by human standards, yet still a local address inside the Milky Way's spiral arms.

Find it in the sky

  • How to spot it. At magnitude 8.1 it is just past naked-eye reach — ordinary binoculars will pull it in, over in Ara.
  • Southern sky only. So far south it never rises for most of the northern hemisphere. To see it you'd have to travel to Chile, South Africa or Australia.
  • Best time of year. It stands highest in the middle of the night around June — that's when to go looking.

Could we get there?

  • Verdict. Impossible with our current technology — and the next millennium of it.

Getting there

  • Aboard Voyager 1. ≈ 21.9 million years at Voyager 1's speed (17 km/s).
  • Fastest probe ever. ≈ 1.9 million years even at the Parker Solar Probe's 192 km/s.

Properties

absmag
0.152
bv
0.066
constellation
Ara
dist ly
1244.8703
luminosity
75.7182
mag
8.06
name
HD 156693
spect
B9/B9.5II/I

About HD 156693

HD 156693 is an uncommon star. It lies about 1,244.9 light-years from Earth, sits in the constellation Ara, shines at apparent magnitude 8.06 and has spectral type B9/B9.5II/I.

Its spectrum reads B9/B9.5II/I — a blue-white B-type star, with a surface tens of thousands of degrees hot and a life measured in tens of millions of years.

How to see it

Look for HD 156693 in the constellation Ara. At apparent magnitude 8.06, it is an easy target for binoculars.

Like any astronomical target, HD 156693 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 HD 156693 is an uncommon star

HD 156693 scores 27 points on Spacedle's rarity scale, which places it in the uncommon tier. Another 7 points would lift it into a rarer tier.

That score comes from 4 science badges — Star, Distant (over 1,000 light-years), Hot blue B-type star and Bright giant — 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.