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Uncommon variable star 22 EP

HIP 18548

RA 59.5228° · Dec 81.2397° · star

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Score breakdown

· 4 badges
22 pts · Uncommon
Uncommon 34 pts → Rare
  • Strongly variable +10
  • Variable star +5
  • Never sets (northern circumpolar) +4
  • A named variable star +3
Total score 22

12 more points to reach Rare.

Badges

  • Variable star · +5
  • Never sets (northern circumpolar) · +4
  • Strongly variable · +10
  • A named variable star · +3

Trivia

Hard to believe

  • True brightness. It pours out about 57.5 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 12.9 it is far too faint for the eye: this one belongs to cameras and long exposures, 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 November — 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
-7.07
constellation
Cep
luminosity
58613.8165
mag
12.93
name
HIP 18548
var amplitude
1.57
var designation
EZ
var max
12.115
var min
13.685

About HIP 18548

HIP 18548 is an uncommon variable star. It sits in the constellation Cep and shines at apparent magnitude 12.93.

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 18548 in the constellation Cep. At apparent magnitude 12.93, it takes a larger telescope or a long-exposure image to capture.

Like any astronomical target, HIP 18548 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 18548 is an uncommon variable star

HIP 18548 scores 22 points on Spacedle's rarity scale, which places it in the uncommon tier. Another 12 points would lift it into a rarer tier.

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