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Rare star 35 EP

HIP 38915

RA 119.4627° · Dec -0.6894° · star

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Score breakdown

· 3 badges
35 pts · Rare
Rare 50 pts → Epic
  • Carbon star (sooty red) +24
  • Deep red star +8
  • Star +3
Total score 35

15 more points to reach Epic.

Badges

  • Star · +3
  • Carbon star (sooty red) · +24
  • Deep red star · +8

Trivia

Hard to believe

  • True brightness. It pours out about 83.9 thousand 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 Ce+... — a carbon star, wrapped in so much soot that its light is filtered to a deep ruby red.

Find it in the sky

  • How to spot it. At magnitude 12.5 it is far too faint for the eye: this one belongs to cameras and long exposures, over in Monoceros.
  • Seen from everywhere. It sits almost on the celestial equator, so it can be seen from essentially anywhere on Earth.
  • Best time of year. It stands highest in the middle of the night around January — that's when to go looking.

Its true colour

  • Its true colour. Measured through blue and visual filters it comes out deep orange-red (B−V 2.6) — one of the coolest surfaces a star can have while still fusing.

By the numbers

  • Surface temperature. Its colour puts the surface at roughly 2680 K, against the Sun's 5778 K.

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.

Properties

absmag
-7.48
bv
2.564
constellation
Mon
luminosity
85506.6713
mag
12.52
name
HIP 38915
spect
Ce+...

About HIP 38915

HIP 38915 is a rare star. It sits in the constellation Mon, shines at apparent magnitude 12.52 and has spectral type Ce+....

Its spectrum reads Ce+... — a carbon star, wrapped in so much soot that its light is filtered to a deep ruby red.

How to see it

Look for HIP 38915 in the constellation Mon. At apparent magnitude 12.52, it takes a larger telescope or a long-exposure image to capture.

Like any astronomical target, HIP 38915 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 38915 is a rare star

HIP 38915 scores 35 points on Spacedle's rarity scale, which places it in the rare tier. Another 15 points would lift it into a rarer tier.

That score comes from 3 science badges — Star, Carbon star (sooty red) and Deep red 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.