XX Cen
ILLUSTRATION FROM SPECTRAL TYPE F7/8II · 6360 K · LUMINOSITY CLASS · VARIABLE, MAG 7.30–8.23 · PERIOD 10.95 DAYS · PULSE COMPRESSED
OVERVIEW
] STARXX Cen is an in the constellation Centaurus, shining at apparent magnitude 7.82 (). It is catalogued as HD 118769 and HIP 66696.
- WHAT IT IS
- Yellow-white bright giant
- HOW BRIGHT (V)
Binoculars reach it; the naked eye does not.
OBSERVING
] FROM WHERE YOU AREWhat it takes to see XX Cen 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 XX Cen is worth going out for.
THROUGH AN EYEPIECE
] 150 MM TELESCOPE · 25 MM EYEPIECEToo faint for your eyes alone. Binoculars reach it. Its brightest companion sits 27.8″ away, which at 48× is cleanly split.
- 48×
- 1.08
- 1.25
- 13.0
- 27.8 · cleanly split
- APPARENT MAGNITUDE ()
- 7.82 · 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 10.6 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
- 16.3
- PROPER MOTION SINCE
- 0.14
Computed for 2026-08-27 00:00 UT. Two things separate it from the catalogued position above: XX Cen 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.
VARIABILITY
] CLASSICAL CEPHEID- RANGE, AS SAMPLED
- 7.30 – 8.23
- PERIOD
- 10.9529 days
- PHASE
- 0.333 ± 0.0038
- NEXT MAXIMUM
- 2026-09-03 07:27 UT---------- --:-- your time
Computed for 2026-08-27 00:00 UT. A phase of zero is maximum light, and XX Cen was last there 3.64 days before that. The ± is what the published elements can still promise: 816 cycles have gone by since the epoch they were measured at, and the last digit of the period compounds over every one of them — 59 min by now. It is the precision of the published figures rather than an error bar the catalogue supplied, so where that catalogue has marked a period doubtful the real spread is wider — and it does not contain the star. A binary with a third body in the system, or a pulsator whose period is slowly changing, walks away from a straight-line ephemeris by an amount only observation settles. Times are corrected for where the Earth is in its orbit, which is worth up to 8.3 minutes — the light of a star reaches us that much earlier in one season than the other, and an epoch measured a century ago has the same correction in it.
The range is the spread the Hipparcos satellite measured, converted to the visual scale. It is approximate: the satellite sampled the star on a schedule of its own, and where a star spends little of its cycle at an extreme — the floor of an eclipse, most obviously — the sampling can miss it altogether. The classification, the period and the epoch are the General Catalogue of Variable Stars’s. The phase at any instant.
DOUBLE STAR
] 1 PAIR| COMPONENTS | SEPARATION | POSITION ANGLE | MAGNITUDE | MEASURED |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| — | 27.8″ | 115° | 18.4 | 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 13403-5737.
CATALOG DATA
] 14 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 IT IS MADE OF
What the object is in itself, rather than how it happens to look from here.
- Spectral type
- Variability
- Classical Cepheid
- Variability type ()
- DCEP
- Variability period
- 10.9529
- Reference epoch ()
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)
- Variable magnitude, brightest
- Variable magnitude, faintest
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)
- −4.59
- Proper motion (Dec)
- −2.22
- Radial velocity
- −18.1
OTHER NAMES AND NUMBERS
The identifiers other catalogues file this object under, for anyone joining this data to theirs.
- Variable-star designation
- XX Cen
- Washington Double Star id
- 13403-5737
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 D)
ALSO KNOWN AS
] 3 DESIGNATIONS- HD HD 118769
- HIP HIP 66696
- Variable star XX Cen
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 118769
Cross-identifications, measured values and the reference behind each of them.
- ADSobject:"HD 118769"
Papers indexed against this object rather than against the string, newest first.
- VizieR5″ around 205.0777 -57.6132
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. XX Cen [catalogue entry]. Data release DR1 (2026-08-21). https://spacecatalog.org/object/hd-118769
@misc{spacecatalog_hd-118769,
author = {{SpaceCatalog}},
title = {{XX Cen}},
howpublished = {SpaceCatalog, data release DR1 (2026-08-21)},
year = {2026},
url = {https://spacecatalog.org/object/hd-118769},
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.