Uncommon star 31 EP

HIP 8260

RA 26.5991° · Dec 61.2583° · star

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Score breakdown

· 4 badges

31 pts · Uncommon

Uncommon 34 pts → Rare

Supergiant +18
Hot blue B-type star +6
Never sets (northern circumpolar) +4
Star +3

Total score 31

3 more points to reach Rare.

Badges

Star · +3
Never sets (northern circumpolar) · +4
Hot blue B-type star · +6
Supergiant · +18

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 B6Iab — 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 supergiant. Drop it where the Sun is and its surface would engulf the inner planets.

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 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 (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: -11.52
bv: 0.651
constellation: Cas
luminosity: 3531831.6979
mag: 8.48
name: HIP 8260
spect: B6Iab

Nearby objects

About HIP 8260

HIP 8260 is an uncommon star. It sits in the constellation Cas, shines at apparent magnitude 8.48 and has spectral type B6Iab.

Its spectrum reads B6Iab — 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 8260 in the constellation Cas. At apparent magnitude 8.48, it is an easy target for binoculars.

Like any astronomical target, HIP 8260 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 8260 is an uncommon star

HIP 8260 scores 31 points on Spacedle's rarity scale, which places it in the uncommon tier. Another 3 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 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.