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Common star 16 EP

HD 112252

RA 194.0640° · Dec -61.7550° · star

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Score breakdown

· 3 badges
16 pts · Common
Common 22 pts → Uncommon
  • Under the Southern Cross +8
  • White A-type star +5
  • Star +3
Total score 16

6 more points to reach Uncommon.

Badges

  • Star · +3
  • Under the Southern Cross · +8
  • White A-type star · +5

Trivia

Hard to believe

  • True brightness. It pours out about 3.7 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 Ap... — an A-type star: white-hot, typically about twice the Sun's mass, and the class most of the sky's famous bright stars belong to.

Find it in the sky

  • How to spot it. At magnitude 8.4 it is just past naked-eye reach — ordinary binoculars will pull it in, 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 April — that's when to go looking.

Its true colour

  • Its true colour. Measured through blue and visual filters it comes out yellow-white (B−V 0.3) — a shade brighter and crisper than our own Sun.
  • 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.

By the numbers

  • Surface temperature. Its colour puts the surface at roughly 7280 K, against the Sun's 5778 K.

Properties

absmag
-11.6
bv
0.33
constellation
Cru
luminosity
3801893.9632
mag
8.4
name
HD 112252
spect
Ap...

About HD 112252

HD 112252 is a common star. It sits in the constellation Cru, shines at apparent magnitude 8.4 and has spectral type Ap....

Its spectrum reads Ap... — an A-type star: white-hot, typically about twice the Sun's mass, and the class most of the sky's famous bright stars belong to.

How to see it

Look for HD 112252 in the constellation Cru. At apparent magnitude 8.4, it is an easy target for binoculars.

Like any astronomical target, HD 112252 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 112252 is a common star

HD 112252 scores 16 points on Spacedle's rarity scale, which places it in the common tier. Another 6 points would lift it into a rarer tier.

That score comes from 3 science badges — Star, Under the Southern Cross and White A-type 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.