27 δ Cep

STARF5Iab:+B7-8 yellow-white supergiant

ILLUSTRATION FROM SPECTRAL TYPE F5Iab:+B7-8 · 6650 K · 1440 L☉ · VARIABLE, MAG 3.60–4.28 · PERIOD 5.366 DAYS · PULSE COMPRESSED

[

OVERVIEW

] STAR

27 δ Cep is an in the constellation Cepheus, 865.1 from Earth, shining at apparent magnitude 4.07 (). It is catalogued as HD 213306, HIP 110991 and HR 8571.

WHAT IT IS
Yellow-white supergiant
HOW FAR
865.1

The light arriving now left it that long ago.

HOW BRIGHT (V)

Bright enough for the naked eye, under a sky dark enough.

WHERE TO LOOK
Cepheus

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

[

THE MODEL

] RADIUS FROM THE LUMINOSITY AND THE TEMPERATURE
OUTSIDE THE SURVEYED VOLUME · DRAG TO ORBIT

CALCULATED · NOT AN OBSERVATION · RADIUS FROM THE LUMINOSITY AND THE TEMPERATURE · SPECTRAL TYPE F5Iab:+B7-8 · 6650 K · 1440 L☉ · VARIABLE, MAG 3.60–4.28 · PERIOD 5.366 DAYS

Drawn from the radius from the luminosity and the temperature and from the same properties the picture at the top of this page uses, at the distance a flight to it would stop. Drag it, or use the arrow keys, to look from another direction. The stars behind are the 498,631 this catalogue holds real distances for, drawn from where the camera actually is — but every one of them is within 170 parsecs of the Sun and this object is much further out, so what is in the frame is that whole neighbourhood seen from outside it, piled into a knot around the Sun. The rest of the sky from here is not something this catalogue knows.

[

OBSERVING

] FROM WHERE YOU ARE

What it takes to see 27 δ Cep 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 27 δ Cep is worth going out for.

[

THROUGH AN EYEPIECE

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

Bright enough to see with your eyes alone, once you are away from town lights. Its brightest companion sits 41.0″ away, which at 48× is cleanly split.

48×
1.08
1.25
13.0
· AC
41.0 · cleanly split
· AB
21.5 · cleanly split
· AG
1.5 · cleanly split
APPARENT MAGNITUDE ()
4.07 · within reach

A is where the pair was the year it was measured — the ones above, between 2015 and 2018, and a pair in a real orbit has moved since. The brightest companion — AC — is 2.0 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
11.3
PROPER MOTION SINCE
0.45

Computed for 2026-08-27 00:00 UT. Two things separate it from the catalogued position above: 27 δ Cep 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
3.60 – 4.28
PERIOD
5.366208 days
PHASE
0.763 ± 0.0001
NEXT MAXIMUM
2026-08-28 06:34 UT---------- --:-- your time
THEN
2026-09-02 15:21 UT---------- --:-- your time

Computed for 2026-08-27 00:00 UT. A phase of zero is maximum light, and 27 δ Cep was last there 4.09 days before that. The ± is what the published elements can still promise: 1,080 cycles have gone by since the epoch they were measured at, and the last digit of the period compounds over every one of them — 1.1 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

] 8 PAIRS
COMPONENTSSEPARATIONPOSITION ANGLEMAGNITUDEMEASURED
AB21.5″282°132015
AH27.4″38°14.92015
AJ33.2″287°15.22015
AF37.3″49°13.92015
AI38.5″110°15.22015
AC41″191°6.112018
AG89.4″287°13.892015
AD109″39°13.92015

Separation and position angle are as measured in the year given; a position angle is measured from north, through east. Washington Double Star Catalog 22292+5825.

Its companion HD 213307 has a page here.

[

CATALOG DATA

] 15 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 IT IS MADE OF

What the object is in itself, rather than how it happens to look from here.

Spectral type
Luminosity
1442.78
Variability
Classical Cepheid
Variability type ()
DCEP
Variability period
5.366208
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)
16.47
Proper motion (Dec)
3.55
Radial velocity
−15

OTHER NAMES AND NUMBERS

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

Variable-star designation
Del Cep
Washington Double Star id
22292+5825

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 (2013AJ....146...93E, quality D)
[

ALSO KNOWN AS

] 4 DESIGNATIONS
  • Bayer/Flamsteed 27 δ Cep
  • HD HD 213306
  • HIP HIP 110991
  • HR HR 8571
[

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. 27 δ Cep [catalogue entry]. Data release DR1 (2026-08-21). https://spacecatalog.org/object/hd-213306
BIBTEX
@misc{spacecatalog_hd-213306,
  author       = {{SpaceCatalog}},
  title        = {{27 δ Cep}},
  howpublished = {SpaceCatalog, data release DR1 (2026-08-21)},
  year         = {2026},
  url          = {https://spacecatalog.org/object/hd-213306},
  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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] 8 LINKED