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Trash star 12 EP

HD 101438

RA 174.3964° · Dec -85.4865° · star

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Score breakdown

· 3 badges
12 pts · Trash
Trash 15 pts → Common
  • Giant star +6
  • Star +3
  • Yellow-white F-type star +3
Total score 12

3 more points to reach Common.

Badges

  • Star · +3
  • Yellow-white F-type star · +3
  • Giant star · +6

Trivia

What it actually is

  • Spectral class. Its spectrum reads F2III/IV — an F-type star — a little hotter, whiter and shorter-lived than the Sun.
  • 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 7.5 it is just past naked-eye reach — ordinary binoculars will pull it in, over in Octans.
  • Southern sky only. So far south it never rises for most of the northern hemisphere. To see it you'd have to travel to Chile, South Africa or Australia.
  • Best time of year. It stands highest in the middle of the night around March — that's when to go looking.

Could we get there?

  • Verdict. Hopelessly far for any craft humanity can build today.

Getting there

  • Aboard Voyager 1. ≈ 5.3 million years at Voyager 1's speed (17 km/s).

Properties

absmag
2.631
bv
0.409
constellation
Oct
dist ly
302.8375
luminosity
7.7197
mag
7.47
name
HD 101438
spect
F2III/IV

About HD 101438

HD 101438 is a trash star. It lies about 302.8 light-years from Earth, sits in the constellation Oct, shines at apparent magnitude 7.47 and has spectral type F2III/IV.

Its spectrum reads F2III/IV — an F-type star — a little hotter, whiter and shorter-lived than the Sun.

How to see it

Look for HD 101438 in the constellation Oct. At apparent magnitude 7.47, it is an easy target for binoculars.

Like any astronomical target, HD 101438 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 101438 is a trash star

HD 101438 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 — Star, Yellow-white F-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.