← Back to dex
Trash variable star 12 EP

HIP 34302

RA 106.6720° · Dec -14.5017° · star

Loading sky survey…
🌌 View in 3D star map
Tonight’s visibility

Computing the sky for your location…

Score breakdown

· 3 badges
12 pts · Trash
Trash 15 pts → Common
  • Variable star +5
  • Gently variable +4
  • A named variable star +3
Total score 12

3 more points to reach Common.

Badges

  • Variable star · +5
  • Gently variable · +4
  • A named variable star · +3

Trivia

Hard to believe

  • True brightness. It pours out about 74.5 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 12.7 it is far too faint for the eye: this one belongs to cameras and long exposures, over in Canis Major.
  • Southern sky. It rides the southern half of the sky — an easier target the further south you are.
  • Best time of year. It stands highest in the middle of the night around January — 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
-7.35
constellation
CMa
luminosity
75857.7575
mag
12.65
name
HIP 34302
var amplitude
0.47
var designation
VV
var max
12.42
var min
12.89

About HIP 34302

HIP 34302 is a trash variable star. It sits in the constellation CMa and shines at apparent magnitude 12.65.

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 34302 in the constellation CMa. At apparent magnitude 12.65, it takes a larger telescope or a long-exposure image to capture.

Like any astronomical target, HIP 34302 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 34302 is a trash variable star

HIP 34302 scores 12 points on Spacedle's rarity scale, which places it in the trash tier. Another 3 points would lift it into a rarer tier.

That score comes from 3 science badges — Variable star, Gently 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.