V1679 Cyg

STARWC7pd+O9V Wolf-Rayet star

ILLUSTRATION FROM SPECTRAL TYPE WC7pd+O9V · 40 000 K · VARIABLE, MAG 7.90–7.94 · TIMING NOT TO SCALE

[

OVERVIEW

] STAR

V1679 Cyg is a WC7pd+O9V Wolf-Rayet star in the constellation Cygnus, shining at apparent magnitude 7.92 (). It is catalogued as HD 192641 and HIP 99769.

WHAT IT IS
Wolf-Rayet star
HOW BRIGHT (V)

Binoculars reach it; the naked eye does not.

WHERE TO LOOK
Cygnus

The patch of sky it sits in, as seen from Earth.

[

OBSERVING

] FROM WHERE YOU ARE

What it takes to see V1679 Cyg 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.

TONIGHT

Say where you are, and this line says when V1679 Cyg is worth going out for.

[

THROUGH AN EYEPIECE

] 150 MM TELESCOPE · 25 MM EYEPIECE
NE
4.7′ ACROSS

Too faint for your eyes alone. Binoculars reach it. Its brightest companion sits 1.9′ away, which at 48× is cleanly split.

48×
1.08
1.25
13.0
· AB
1.9 · cleanly split
APPARENT MAGNITUDE ()
7.92 · 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 — AB — is 2.1 magnitudes down on the star itself, which this far out from it is a faint speck beside a bright star rather than a matched pair.

FIND IT ON THE SKY MAP ↗
[

APPARENT PLACE

] EQUINOX J2026.7

Where 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
13.0
PROPER MOTION SINCE
0.16

Computed for 2026-08-27 00:00 UT. Two things separate it from the catalogued position above: V1679 Cyg 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

] WOLF-RAYET STAR WITH VARIABLE EMISSION
RANGE, AS SAMPLED
7.90 – 7.94

No period is published for this star, so there is no cycle to count. The catalogue records that it varies and by how much, and not how often.

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 is the General Catalogue of Variable Stars’s. These elements as data.

[

DOUBLE STAR

] 1 PAIR
COMPONENTSSEPARATIONPOSITION ANGLEMAGNITUDEMEASURED
AB113.6″117°10.062015

Separation and position angle are as measured in the year given; a position angle is measured from north, through east. Washington Double Star Catalog 20145+3640.

[

LIFE OF THIS STAR

] STAGE 2 OF 5

V1679 Cyg is a blue star on the main sequence, fusing hydrogen in its core — about six hundred thousand years of it in all — and when that hydrogen is gone it will swell into a supergiant, and end by exploding as a supernova and leaving a black hole.

  1. COLLAPSING CLOUD
    took about three thousand years
  2. MAIN SEQUENCE
    about six hundred thousand years in all
    NOW
  3. SUPERGIANT
    about sixty thousand years of it, when it comes
  4. SUPERNOVA
    bright for weeks, over in a second
  5. BLACK HOLE
    for the rest of time

NOW 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.

NEXT 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.

EVERY STAGE ON THIS TRACK
COLLAPSING CLOUDtook about three 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 SEQUENCEabout six hundred thousand years in allNOW
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 sixty thousand years of it, when it comes
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.
BLACK HOLEfor the rest of time
Nothing the core could be made of is stiff enough to stop the collapse, so it does not stop. What remains is a region of space that light cannot leave.
  • HOW FIRM No mass has been measured for this star. The figure above is inferred from its temperature by way of the main-sequence relation between the two, which is tight enough to be worth stating and is still an inference.
  • ALSO Its hydrogen envelope has already been driven off by its own wind, which is a late and short-lived condition and one that only the heaviest stars reach.

Which stage V1679 Cyg 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 fifty 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

] 12 FIELDS

The 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
Variability
Wolf-Rayet star with variable emission
Variability type ()
WR

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)
−2.88
Proper motion (Dec)
−5.34
Radial velocity
0

OTHER NAMES AND NUMBERS

The identifiers other catalogues file this object under, for anyone joining this data to theirs.

Variable-star designation
V1679 Cyg
Washington Double Star id
20145+3640

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 (2016MNRAS.461.4115R, quality C)
[

ALSO KNOWN AS

] 3 DESIGNATIONS
  • HD HD 192641
  • HIP HIP 99769
  • Variable star V1679 Cyg
[

LOOK IT UP ELSEWHERE

] 3 SERVICES

Each 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.

[

CITE THIS PAGE

] DR1

This 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.

PLAIN TEXT
SpaceCatalog. V1679 Cyg [catalogue entry]. Data release DR1 (2026-08-21). https://spacecatalog.org/object/hd-192641
BIBTEX
@misc{spacecatalog_hd-192641,
  author       = {{SpaceCatalog}},
  title        = {{V1679 Cyg}},
  howpublished = {SpaceCatalog, data release DR1 (2026-08-21)},
  year         = {2026},
  url          = {https://spacecatalog.org/object/hd-192641},
  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.

[

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