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Uncommon star 24 EP

HD 120432

RA 207.8970° · Dec -65.7731° · star

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Score breakdown

· 3 badges
24 pts · Uncommon
Uncommon 34 pts → Rare
  • Supergiant +18
  • Star +3
  • Yellow-white F-type star +3
Total score 24

10 more points to reach Rare.

Badges

  • Star · +3
  • Yellow-white F-type star · +3
  • Supergiant · +18

Trivia

Hard to believe

  • True brightness. It pours out about 4.8 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 F8/G0Ib/II — an F-type star — a little hotter, whiter and shorter-lived than the Sun.

Find it in the sky

  • How to spot it. At magnitude 8.1 it is just past naked-eye reach — ordinary binoculars will pull it in, over in Circinus.
  • 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 orange (B−V 1) — cooler than the Sun, and the kind of star that burns steadily for tens of billions of years.
  • 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 4800 K, against the Sun's 5778 K.

Properties

absmag
-11.88
bv
0.975
constellation
Cir
luminosity
4920395.3568
mag
8.12
name
HD 120432
spect
F8/G0Ib/II

Nearby objects

About HD 120432

HD 120432 is an uncommon star. It sits in the constellation Cir, shines at apparent magnitude 8.12 and has spectral type F8/G0Ib/II.

Its spectrum reads F8/G0Ib/II — an F-type star — a little hotter, whiter and shorter-lived than the Sun.

How to see it

Look for HD 120432 in the constellation Cir. At apparent magnitude 8.12, it is an easy target for binoculars.

Like any astronomical target, HD 120432 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 120432 is an uncommon star

HD 120432 scores 24 points on Spacedle's rarity scale, which places it in the uncommon tier. Another 10 points would lift it into a rarer tier.

That score comes from 3 science badges — Star, Yellow-white F-type star and Supergiant — 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.