Uncommon star 25 EP

HIP 114990

RA 349.3399° · Dec 64.1212° · star

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Score breakdown

· 4 badges

25 pts · Uncommon

Uncommon 34 pts → Rare

Bright giant +12
Hot blue B-type star +6
Never sets (northern circumpolar) +4
Star +3

Total score 25

9 more points to reach Rare.

Badges

Star · +3
Never sets (northern circumpolar) · +4
Hot blue B-type star · +6
Bright giant · +12

Trivia

Hard to believe

True brightness. It pours out about 3.5 million 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 B0II — 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.
Where it is in life. It is a bright giant, well on its way to the largest stars there are.

Find it in the sky

How to spot it. At magnitude 8.5 it is just past naked-eye reach — ordinary binoculars will pull it in, over in Cepheus.
Never sets. So far north that from Britain, Canada or northern Europe it never dips below the horizon — it is up every clear night of the year.
Best time of year. It stands highest in the middle of the night around September — that's when to go looking.

Its true colour

Its true colour. Measured through blue and visual filters it comes out yellow (B−V 0.7) — almost exactly the Sun's own shade — a stellar twin in colour, if not in size.
Why no green stars. No star ever looks green: a surface hot enough to peak in green also floods out plenty of red and blue, and your eye blends the mixture back to white.

Properties

absmag: -11.54
bv: 0.71
constellation: Cep
luminosity: 3597493.3516
mag: 8.46
name: HIP 114990
spect: B0II

Nearby objects

About HIP 114990

HIP 114990 is an uncommon star. It sits in the constellation Cep, shines at apparent magnitude 8.46 and has spectral type B0II.

Its spectrum reads B0II — 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 HIP 114990 in the constellation Cep. At apparent magnitude 8.46, it is an easy target for binoculars.

Like any astronomical target, HIP 114990 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 114990 is an uncommon star

HIP 114990 scores 25 points on Spacedle's rarity scale, which places it in the uncommon tier. Another 9 points would lift it into a rarer tier.

That score comes from 4 science badges — Star, Never sets (northern circumpolar), 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.