V478 Cyg
ILLUSTRATION FROM SPECTRAL TYPE B0Vp · 30 000 K · VARIABLE, MAG 8.64–8.98 · PERIOD 2.881 DAYS · PULSE COMPRESSED
OBSERVING
] FROM WHERE YOU AREWhat it takes to see V478 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.
Say where you are, and this line says when V478 Cyg 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 3.70″ away, which at 48× is split, with the two all but touching.
- 48×
- 1.08
- 1.25
- 13.0
- 3.70 · split, with the two all but touching
- APPARENT MAGNITUDE ()
- 8.68 · 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 5.8 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
- 0.17
Computed for 2026-08-28 00:00 UT. Two things separate it from the catalogued position above: V478 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
] ALGOL-TYPE ECLIPSING BINARY- RANGE, AS SAMPLED
- 8.64 – 8.98
- PERIOD
- 2.8808994 days
- PHASE
- 0.429 ± 0.0002
- NEXT MINIMUM
- 2026-08-29 15:28 UT---------- --:-- your time
- THEN
- 2026-09-01 12:36 UT---------- --:-- your time
Computed for 2026-08-28 00:00 UT. A phase of zero is minimum light, and V478 Cyg was last there 29.7 h before that. The ± is what the published elements can still promise: 6,830 cycles have gone by since the epoch they were measured at, and the last digit of the period compounds over every one of them — 52 s 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 |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| — | 3.7″ | 259° | 14.5 | 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 20196+3820.
SPECTRUM
] A SPECTRUM OF ITS TYPENo survey in this catalogue has measured V478 Cyg’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, B0 V. 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 V478 Cyg.
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. B0 V — the average of several real stars of this type, not an observation of any one star. Sampled every 5 angstroms; 1,891 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 6 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 2 OF 5V478 Cyg is a blue-white star on the main sequence, fusing hydrogen in its core — about ten million 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 neutron star.
- COLLAPSING CLOUDtook about fifty thousand years
- MAIN SEQUENCEabout ten million years in allNOW
- SUPERGIANTabout a million years of it, when it comes
- SUPERNOVAbright for weeks, over in a second
- NEUTRON STARfor 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 fifty 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 ten million 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 a million 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.
- 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. 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.
Which stage V478 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 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, rounded to a single figure. They are orders of magnitude and none of them is a date.
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 KIND OF THING IT IS
What the object is in itself, rather than how it happens to look from here.
- Spectral type
- Variability
- Algol-type eclipsing binary
- Variability type ()
- EA/DM
- Variability period
- 2.8808994
- 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)
- −3.67
- Proper motion (Dec)
- −5.25
- Radial velocity
- −11.1
OTHER NAMES AND NUMBERS
The identifiers other catalogues file this object under, for anyone joining this data to theirs.
- Variable-star designation
- V478 Cyg
- Washington Double Star id
- 20196+3820
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 (1955ApJS....2...41M, quality C)
ALSO KNOWN AS
] 3 DESIGNATIONS- HD HD 193611
- HIP HIP 100227
- Variable star V478 Cyg
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 193611
Cross-identifications, measured values and the reference behind each of them.
- ADSobject:"HD 193611"
Papers indexed against this object rather than against the string, newest first.
- VizieR5″ around 304.9115 +38.3359
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. V478 Cyg [catalogue entry]. Data release DR1 (2026-08-21). https://spacecatalog.org/object/hd-193611
@misc{spacecatalog_hd-193611,
author = {{SpaceCatalog}},
title = {{V478 Cyg}},
howpublished = {SpaceCatalog, data release DR1 (2026-08-21)},
year = {2026},
url = {https://spacecatalog.org/object/hd-193611},
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.