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Common star 19 EP

HD 121662

RA 209.8389° · Dec -67.8406° · star

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Score breakdown

· 4 badges
19 pts · Common
Common 22 pts → Uncommon
  • Hot blue B-type star +6
  • Subgiant (leaving the main sequence) +5
  • Blue-white star +5
  • Star +3
Total score 19

3 more points to reach Uncommon.

Badges

  • Star · +3
  • Hot blue B-type star · +6
  • Subgiant (leaving the main sequence) · +5
  • Blue-white star · +5

Trivia

What it actually is

  • Spectral class. Its spectrum reads B2/B3IV — a blue-white B-type star, with a surface tens of thousands of degrees hot and a life measured in tens of millions of years.

Find it in the sky

  • How to spot it. At magnitude 7.4 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 blue-white (B−V -0) — the hallmark of a surface far hotter than the Sun's.
  • 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 10750 K, against the Sun's 5778 K.

What's in a name

  • Its catalogue. The HD number is from the Henry Draper Catalogue, in which Annie Jump Cannon personally classified the spectra of nearly 400,000 stars — still the largest such feat by one person.

Properties

absmag
-12.57
bv
-0.047
constellation
Cir
luminosity
9289663.8678
mag
7.43
name
HD 121662
spect
B2/B3IV

About HD 121662

HD 121662 is a common star. It sits in the constellation Cir, shines at apparent magnitude 7.43 and has spectral type B2/B3IV.

Its spectrum reads B2/B3IV — a blue-white B-type star, with a surface tens of thousands of degrees hot and a life measured in tens of millions of years.

How to see it

Look for HD 121662 in the constellation Cir. At apparent magnitude 7.43, it is an easy target for binoculars.

Like any astronomical target, HD 121662 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 121662 is a common star

HD 121662 scores 19 points on Spacedle's rarity scale, which places it in the common tier. Another 3 points would lift it into a rarer tier.

That score comes from 4 science badges — Star, Hot blue B-type star, Subgiant (leaving the main sequence) and Blue-white 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.