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Common star 21 EP

HD 233891

RA 179.9961° · Dec 51.7716° · star

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Score breakdown

· 4 badges
21 pts · Common
Common 22 pts → Uncommon
  • Sun-like G-type star +8
  • Giant star +6
  • Never sets (northern circumpolar) +4
  • Star +3
Total score 21

1 more point to reach Uncommon.

Badges

  • Star · +3
  • Never sets (northern circumpolar) · +4
  • Sun-like G-type star · +8
  • Giant star · +6

Trivia

Hard to believe

  • True brightness. It pours out about 2.6 million 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 G5IIIm — a G-type star: the very same spectral class as our own Sun.
  • Where it is in life. It is a giant. It has already exhausted its core hydrogen and swollen up enormously in response.

Find it in the sky

  • How to spot it. At magnitude 8.8 it is just past naked-eye reach — ordinary binoculars will pull it in, over in Ursa Major.
  • Northern sky. It rides the northern half of the sky — an easier target the further north you are.
  • Best time of year. It stands highest in the middle of the night around March — that's when to go looking.

Its true colour

  • Its true colour. Measured through blue and visual filters it comes out yellow (B−V 0.8) — almost exactly the Sun's own shade — a stellar twin in colour, if not in size.
  • Why no green stars. No star ever looks green: a surface hot enough to peak in green also floods out plenty of red and blue, and your eye blends the mixture back to white.

Properties

absmag
-11.2
bv
0.798
constellation
UMa
luminosity
2630267.9919
mag
8.8
name
HD 233891
spect
G5IIIm

About HD 233891

HD 233891 is a common star. It sits in the constellation UMa, shines at apparent magnitude 8.8 and has spectral type G5IIIm.

Its spectrum reads G5IIIm — a G-type star: the very same spectral class as our own Sun.

How to see it

Look for HD 233891 in the constellation UMa. At apparent magnitude 8.8, it is an easy target for binoculars.

Like any astronomical target, HD 233891 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 233891 is a common star

HD 233891 scores 21 points on Spacedle's rarity scale, which places it in the common tier. Another 1 point would lift it into a rarer tier.

That score comes from 4 science badges — Star, Never sets (northern circumpolar), Sun-like G-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.