HD 100826
ILLUSTRATION FROM SPECTRAL TYPE B9.5Iab/b · 10 200 K · LUMINOSITY CLASS
OVERVIEW
] STARHD 100826 is a in the constellation Centaurus, shining at apparent magnitude 6.23 (). It is catalogued as HIP 56550.
- WHAT IT IS
- Blue-white supergiant
- HOW BRIGHT (V)
Bright enough for the naked eye, under a sky dark enough.
OBSERVING
] FROM WHERE YOU AREWhat it takes to see HD 100826 for yourself. Everything in this part of the page is worked out for a real horizon, a real night and the equipment you say you have.
Say where you are, and this line says when HD 100826 is worth going out for.
THROUGH AN EYEPIECE
] 150 MM TELESCOPE · 25 MM EYEPIECEBright enough to see with your eyes alone, once you are away from town lights. Its brightest companion sits 4.20″ away, which at 48× is cleanly split.
- 48×
- 1.08
- 1.25
- 13.0
- 4.20 · cleanly split
- APPARENT MAGNITUDE ()
- 6.23 · within reach
A is where the pair was the year it was measured — the ones above, in 2015, and a pair in a real orbit has moved since. The brightest companion is 6.7 magnitudes down on the star itself, which makes it a harder split than the angle alone suggests: the glare of the brighter one is what you are separating it from.
APPARENT PLACE
] EQUINOX J2026.7Where a telescope has to be pointed today, which is not quite where the catalogue records the object: the coordinate grid itself has turned since the year 2000 the catalogue is referred to.
- RIGHT ASCENSION
- DECLINATION
- GRID TURNED SINCE
- 12.6
- PROPER MOTION SINCE
- 0.19
Computed for 2026-08-27 00:00 UT. Two things separate it from the catalogued position above: HD 100826 has moved under its own proper motion, and the coordinate grid has turned under it — about fifty arcseconds a year of precession since 2000, and the small nodding of the Earth’s axis on top of that. Aberration and refraction are not included, and neither is parallax; each is under an arcminute, which is also about as well as the catalogued position is known. The same figure for any date.
DOUBLE STAR
] 1 PAIR| COMPONENTS | SEPARATION | POSITION ANGLE | MAGNITUDE | MEASURED |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| — | 4.2″ | 22° | 12.9 | 2015 |
Separation and position angle are as measured in the year given; a position angle is measured from north, through east. Washington Double Star Catalog 11357-6117.
SPECTRUM
] A SPECTRUM OF ITS TYPENo survey in this catalogue has measured HD 100826’s own spectrum: the one that reaches deepest saturates on the brightest stars, and no spectrograph has been pointed at the whole sky. What is drawn below is the average of several real stars of the same class, A0 I — the nearest class the atlas holds to B9.5Iab/b. It shows what a star like this one shows, and every line named on it is a line of the type rather than a measurement of HD 100826.
A star gives out light at every wavelength at once. The dark gaps are atoms in the thin gas above its surface, each one removing the single colour it is able to absorb — which is how a list of ingredients is read off something nobody will ever touch.
Point at a labelled line — or an element above — to see which atom makes it and where it falls.
Pickles (1998) stellar spectral flux library. A0 I — the average of several real stars of this type, not an observation of any one star. Sampled every 5 angstroms; 1,895 points rebinned onto 1,024 log-spaced display points and normalised to the median flux. Brightness is scaled to this spectrum’s own middle value, so the shape is the measurement and the height is not. The 7 lines named above are the ones that stand clear of the scatter and of the features around them; a spectrum at this sampling holds many more that it cannot separate. The samples themselves, as JSON, CSV or VOTable.
LIFE OF THIS STAR
] STAGE 3 OF 5HD 100826 is a blue-white supergiant near the end of its life; within about a million years it will collapse and explode as a supernova, leaving a neutron star.
- COLLAPSING CLOUDtook about sixty thousand years
- MAIN SEQUENCElasted about ten million years
- SUPERGIANTabout a million years of itNOW
- SUPERNOVAbright for weeks, over in a second
- NEUTRON STARfor the rest of time
NOW The same swelling, on a star heavy enough to keep going: helium, then carbon, then a run of heavier elements each burning faster than the last, until the core is iron and fusion can release nothing more.
NEXT The iron core collapses in about a second and the rest of the star is thrown off at a tenth of the speed of light. For a few weeks it outshines the galaxy it is in.
EVERY STAGE ON THIS TRACK
- COLLAPSING CLOUDtook about sixty thousand years
- A cold clump of gas and dust falls in on itself and heats as it falls. It stops being a cloud and starts being a star at the moment its core is hot enough to fuse hydrogen.
- MAIN SEQUENCElasted about ten million years
- Hydrogen fuses to helium in the core, and the outward push of that exactly balances the star's own weight. This is the long, steady stretch — nine-tenths of a star's life — and it ends when the core's hydrogen is gone.
- SUPERGIANTabout a million years of itNOW
- The same swelling, on a star heavy enough to keep going: helium, then carbon, then a run of heavier elements each burning faster than the last, until the core is iron and fusion can release nothing more.
- SUPERNOVAbright for weeks, over in a second
- The iron core collapses in about a second and the rest of the star is thrown off at a tenth of the speed of light. For a few weeks it outshines the galaxy it is in.
- NEUTRON STARfor the rest of time
- What is left of the core: a couple of solar masses in a ball the width of a city, so dense that its protons and electrons have been pressed into neutrons.
- HOW FIRM No mass has been measured for this star, and past the main sequence its temperature no longer implies one — a red giant of one solar mass and a red supergiant of fifteen are the same colour. The figure above comes from its total output instead, and is unlikely to be better than a factor of two.
Which stage HD 100826 is in was read from its catalogued class, its temperature and its total output at every wavelength — not from its brightness in visible light alone, which understates a cool star by a factor of several. The mass it started with is about twenty times the Sun's mass, from its temperature, and that mass is what chooses the track. Every span of time here comes from the standard relation between a star’s mass and how long its fuel lasts, and is rounded to a single figure: they are orders of magnitude and none of them is a date.
CATALOG DATA
] 7 FIELDSThe raw catalogue values, as the source published them, with the error bars where one was published — sorted by what each set of figures is about rather than by the order they happened to be stored in.
WHAT KIND OF THING IT IS
What the object is in itself, rather than how it happens to look from here.
- Spectral type
HOW BRIGHT IT IS
What the light adds up to, measured through one filter at a time. A magnitude is a brightness on a backwards scale — the smaller the number, the brighter the object.
- Colour index (B−V)
WHERE IT IS AND HOW IT MOVES
Position, motion across the sky and the size it covers on it. These are measurements of the object as seen from here, so every one of them depends on where here is.
- Proper motion (RA)
- −7
- Proper motion (Dec)
- 1.54
- Radial velocity
- −14.6
OTHER NAMES AND NUMBERS
The identifiers other catalogues file this object under, for anyone joining this data to theirs.
- Washington Double Star id
- 11357-6117
WHERE THESE FIGURES CAME FROM
Which catalogue, paper or model each of the fields above was read from, where the source named one.
- Spectral type from
- SIMBAD (1975MSS...C01....0H, quality C)
ALSO KNOWN AS
] 2 DESIGNATIONS- HD HD 100826
- HIP HIP 56550
LOOK IT UP ELSEWHERE
] 3 SERVICESEach link carries the identifier printed beside it. Nothing on this page is a measurement of our own, so a number that disagrees with one of these is worth reporting — and a service that has never catalogued this object under this name will say so plainly.
- SIMBADHD 100826
Cross-identifications, measured values and the reference behind each of them.
- ADSobject:"HD 100826"
Papers indexed against this object rather than against the string, newest first.
- VizieR5″ around 173.9264 -61.2879
Every published table with a row at this position, searched by coordinates rather than by name.
CITE THIS PAGE
] DR1This page is live and its numbers move when an upstream refreshes, so the citation names the release the rows belong to rather than the day you read them. The release itself is frozen, republished as a bundle, and is what a data-availability statement should point at.
SpaceCatalog. HD 100826 [catalogue entry]. Data release DR1 (2026-08-21). https://spacecatalog.org/object/hd-100826
@misc{spacecatalog_hd-100826,
author = {{SpaceCatalog}},
title = {{HD 100826}},
howpublished = {SpaceCatalog, data release DR1 (2026-08-21)},
year = {2026},
url = {https://spacecatalog.org/object/hd-100826},
note = {Catalogue entry, data release DR1 (2026-08-21). Values from HYG Database v4.1.}
}The values above were taken from HYG Database v4.1 — CC-BY-SA-4.0. Citing this page does not replace citing that catalogue, and its licence is share-alike: the terms reach whatever you build from these rows.