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Uncommon star 28 EP

Eta Cru

RA 181.7203° · Dec -64.6137° · star

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Score breakdown

· 5 badges
28 pts · Uncommon
Uncommon 34 pts → Rare
  • Naked-eye visible +8
  • Under the Southern Cross +8
  • Giant star +6
  • Star +3
  • Yellow-white F-type star +3
Total score 28

6 more points to reach Rare.

Badges

  • Star · +3
  • Naked-eye visible · +8
  • Under the Southern Cross · +8
  • Yellow-white F-type star · +3
  • Giant star · +6

Trivia

What it actually is

  • Spectral class. Its spectrum reads F2III — 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. Inside our stellar backyard: every radio broadcast humanity has ever made has already swept past it.

Find it in the sky

  • How to spot it. At magnitude 4.1 you can see it with your own eyes from a dark site, over in Crux.
  • 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. ≈ 1.1 million years at Voyager 1's speed (17 km/s).

Properties

absmag
2.662
bv
0.353
constellation
Cru
dist ly
64.4321
luminosity
7.5024
mag
4.14
name
Eta Cru
spect
F2III

About Eta Cru

Eta Cru is an uncommon star. It lies about 64.4 light-years from Earth, sits in the constellation Cru, shines at apparent magnitude 4.14 and has spectral type F2III.

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

How to see it

Look for Eta Cru in the constellation Cru. At apparent magnitude 4.14, it can be glimpsed with the unaided eye under dark skies.

Like any astronomical target, Eta Cru 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 Eta Cru is an uncommon star

Eta Cru scores 28 points on Spacedle's rarity scale, which places it in the uncommon tier. Another 6 points would lift it into a rarer tier.

That score comes from 5 science badges — Star, Naked-eye visible, Under the Southern Cross, 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.