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Uncommon star 30 EP

HD 4717

RA 12.5680° · Dec 63.1714° · star

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Score breakdown

· 4 badges
30 pts · Uncommon
Uncommon 34 pts → Rare
  • Supergiant +18
  • White A-type star +5
  • Never sets (northern circumpolar) +4
  • Star +3
Total score 30

4 more points to reach Rare.

Badges

  • Star · +3
  • Never sets (northern circumpolar) · +4
  • White A-type star · +5
  • Supergiant · +18

Trivia

Hard to believe

  • True brightness. It pours out about 5.1 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 A0Ib — 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.
  • Where it is in life. It is a supergiant, hundreds of times wider than the Sun.

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 Cassiopeia.
  • 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 October — that's when to go looking.

Its true colour

  • Its true colour. Measured through blue and visual filters it comes out yellow-white (B−V 0.5) — a shade brighter and crisper than our own Sun.
  • 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
-11.93
bv
0.535
constellation
Cas
luminosity
5152286.4458
mag
8.07
name
HD 4717
spect
A0Ib

About HD 4717

HD 4717 is an uncommon star. It sits in the constellation Cas, shines at apparent magnitude 8.07 and has spectral type A0Ib.

Its spectrum reads A0Ib — 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 4717 in the constellation Cas. At apparent magnitude 8.07, it is an easy target for binoculars.

Like any astronomical target, HD 4717 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 4717 is an uncommon star

HD 4717 scores 30 points on Spacedle's rarity scale, which places it in the uncommon tier. Another 4 points would lift it into a rarer tier.

That score comes from 4 science badges — Star, Never sets (northern circumpolar), White A-type star and Supergiant — 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.