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Common star 19 EP

HD 157678

RA 262.2478° · Dec -63.4239° · star

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Score breakdown

· 4 badges
19 pts · Common
Common 22 pts → Uncommon
  • Distant (over 1,000 light-years) +6
  • White A-type star +5
  • Blue-white star +5
  • Star +3
Total score 19

3 more points to reach Uncommon.

Badges

  • Star · +3
  • Distant (over 1,000 light-years) · +6
  • White A-type star · +5
  • Blue-white star · +5

Trivia

What it actually is

  • Spectral class. Its spectrum reads Ap... — 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.

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. ≈ 41.8 million years at Voyager 1's speed (17 km/s).
  • Fastest probe ever. ≈ 3.7 million years even at the Parker Solar Probe's 192 km/s.

Properties

absmag
-1.186
bv
-0.089
constellation
Ara
dist ly
2380.7007
luminosity
259.657
mag
8.13
name
HD 157678
spect
Ap...

About HD 157678

HD 157678 is a common star. It lies about 2,380.7 light-years from Earth, sits in the constellation Ara, shines at apparent magnitude 8.13 and has spectral type Ap....

Its spectrum reads Ap... — 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 HD 157678 in the constellation Ara. At apparent magnitude 8.13, it is an easy target for binoculars.

Like any astronomical target, HD 157678 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 157678 is a common star

HD 157678 scores 19 points on Spacedle's rarity scale, which places it in the common tier. Another 3 points would lift it into a rarer tier.

That score comes from 4 science badges — Star, Distant (over 1,000 light-years), White A-type star and Blue-white 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.