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Uncommon star 25 EP

HD 11859

RA 29.5890° · Dec 60.0459° · star

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Score breakdown

· 5 badges
25 pts · Uncommon
Uncommon 34 pts → Rare
  • Distant (over 1,000 light-years) +6
  • Hot blue B-type star +6
  • Giant star +6
  • Never sets (northern circumpolar) +4
  • Star +3
Total score 25

9 more points to reach Rare.

Badges

  • Star · +3
  • Distant (over 1,000 light-years) · +6
  • Never sets (northern circumpolar) · +4
  • Hot blue B-type star · +6
  • Giant star · +6

Trivia

What it actually is

  • Spectral class. Its spectrum reads B9III — 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 giant. It has already exhausted its core hydrogen and swollen up enormously in response.

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 8.6 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.

Could we get there?

  • Verdict. Impossible with our current technology — and the next millennium of it.

Getting there

  • Aboard Voyager 1. ≈ 19.5 million years at Voyager 1's speed (17 km/s).

Properties

absmag
0.962
bv
0.124
constellation
Cas
dist ly
1109.3743
luminosity
35.9087
mag
8.62
name
HD 11859
spect
B9III

About HD 11859

HD 11859 is an uncommon star. It lies about 1,109.4 light-years from Earth, sits in the constellation Cas, shines at apparent magnitude 8.62 and has spectral type B9III.

Its spectrum reads B9III — 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 HD 11859 in the constellation Cas. At apparent magnitude 8.62, it is an easy target for binoculars.

Like any astronomical target, HD 11859 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 11859 is an uncommon star

HD 11859 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 5 science badges — Star, Distant (over 1,000 light-years), Never sets (northern circumpolar), Hot blue B-type star and Giant 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.