← Back to dex
Common variable star 20 EP

HIP 102190

RA 310.5848° · Dec 19.1609° · star

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

Computing the sky for your location…

Score breakdown

· 4 badges
20 pts · Common
Common 22 pts → Uncommon
  • Strongly variable +10
  • Variable star +5
  • A named variable star +3
  • Main-sequence star +2
Total score 20

2 more points to reach Uncommon.

Badges

  • Variable star · +5
  • Main-sequence star · +2
  • Strongly variable · +10
  • A named variable star · +3

Trivia

Hard to believe

  • True brightness. It pours out about 101.9 thousand times as much light as the Sun. It only looks ordinary because it is so far away.

What it actually is

  • 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 12.3 it is far too faint for the eye: this one belongs to cameras and long exposures, over in Delphinus.
  • 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 August — 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
-7.69
constellation
Del
luminosity
103752.8416
mag
12.31
name
HIP 102190
spect
pec(NOVA)
var amplitude
0.51
var designation
HR
var max
12.003
var min
12.513

About HIP 102190

HIP 102190 is a common variable star. It sits in the constellation Del, shines at apparent magnitude 12.31 and has spectral type pec(NOVA).

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.

How to see it

Look for HIP 102190 in the constellation Del. At apparent magnitude 12.31, it takes a larger telescope or a long-exposure image to capture.

Like any astronomical target, HIP 102190 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 102190 is a common variable star

HIP 102190 scores 20 points on Spacedle's rarity scale, which places it in the common tier. Another 2 points would lift it into a rarer tier.

That score comes from 4 science badges — Variable star, Main-sequence 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.