V350 Lac

STARK2III orange giant

ILLUSTRATION FROM SPECTRAL TYPE K2III · 4840 K · 29.4 L☉ · VARIABLE, MAG 6.35–6.48 · PERIOD 17.75 DAYS · PULSE COMPRESSED

[

OVERVIEW

] STAR

V350 Lac is a in the constellation Lacerta, 362.8 from Earth, shining at apparent magnitude 6.41 (). It is catalogued as HD 213389, HIP 111072 and HR 8575.

WHAT IT IS
Orange giant
HOW FAR
362.8

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
Lacerta

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

[

THE MODEL

] RADIUS FROM THE LUMINOSITY AND THE TEMPERATURE
DRAG TO ORBIT

CALCULATED · NOT AN OBSERVATION · RADIUS FROM THE LUMINOSITY AND THE TEMPERATURE · SPECTRAL TYPE K2III · 4840 K · 29.4 L☉ · VARIABLE, MAG 6.35–6.48 · PERIOD 17.75 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, at their real positions and drawn from where the camera actually is — so the constellations are wrong, and that is the point. This is the sky from there, not the sky from here.

[

OBSERVING

] FROM WHERE YOU ARE

What it takes to see V350 Lac 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 V350 Lac is worth going out for.

[

THROUGH AN EYEPIECE

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

Bright enough to see with your eyes alone, once you are away from town lights. Its brightest companion sits 1.1′ away, which at 48× is cleanly split.

48×
1.08
1.25
13.0
1.1 · cleanly split
APPARENT MAGNITUDE ()
6.41 · 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 4.3 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
13.5
PROPER MOTION SINCE
1.05

Computed for 2026-08-27 00:00 UT. Two things separate it from the catalogued position above: V350 Lac 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

] ELLIPSOIDAL ROTATING VARIABLE
RANGE, AS SAMPLED
6.35 – 6.48
PERIOD
17.748 days
PHASE
0.898 ± 0.027
NEXT MINIMUM
2026-08-28 19:35 UT---------- --:-- your time

Computed for 2026-08-27 00:00 UT. A phase of zero is minimum light, and V350 Lac was last there 15.9 days before that. The ± is what the published elements can still promise: 961 cycles have gone by since the epoch they were measured at, and the last digit of the period compounds over every one of them — 11.5 h 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
COMPONENTSSEPARATIONPOSITION ANGLEMAGNITUDEMEASURED
66.8″90°10.742015

Separation and position angle are as measured in the year given; a position angle is measured from north, through east. Washington Double Star Catalog 22301+4921.

[

SPECTRUM

] A SPECTRUM OF ITS TYPE
TYPE SPECTRUM · K2 III

No survey in this catalogue has measured V350 Lac’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, K2 III. 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 V350 Lac.

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.

MADE OF
400500600700800900WAVELENGTH · NANOMETRESCa II H & KG band (CH)Mg I bFe I blendNa I DCa II triplet

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. K2 III — 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 8 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 5

V350 Lac is an orange giant, past the main sequence and burning helium in a core that has no hydrogen left in it; in about four hundred million years it will shed its outer layers as a planetary nebula and leave a white dwarf behind.

  1. COLLAPSING CLOUD
    took about twenty million years
  2. MAIN SEQUENCE
    lasted about four billion years
  3. GIANT
    about four hundred million years of it
    NOW
  4. PLANETARY NEBULA
    gone in about twenty thousand years
  5. WHITE DWARF
    cooling from then on

NOW With the core out of hydrogen, the star swells enormously and its surface cools to red. It burns helium in the core and hydrogen in a shell around it, and it loses mass from its surface the whole time.

NEXT The outer layers drift away and the exposed core lights them from inside. It is one of the shortest things a star does and one of the most visible — most of the glowing shells in this catalogue are this stage of some star.

EVERY STAGE ON THIS TRACK
COLLAPSING CLOUDtook about twenty million 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 four billion 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.
GIANTabout four hundred million years of itNOW
With the core out of hydrogen, the star swells enormously and its surface cools to red. It burns helium in the core and hydrogen in a shell around it, and it loses mass from its surface the whole time.
PLANETARY NEBULAgone in about twenty thousand years
The outer layers drift away and the exposed core lights them from inside. It is one of the shortest things a star does and one of the most visible — most of the glowing shells in this catalogue are this stage of some star.
WHITE DWARFcooling from then on
The bare core, about the size of the Earth, held up by nothing but the resistance of its own crushed electrons. No fusion, no fuel, nothing left to do but cool.
  • 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 V350 Lac 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 half again the Sun's mass, from its luminosity, 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

] 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 KIND OF THING IT IS

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

Spectral type
Luminosity
29.4036
Variability
Ellipsoidal rotating variable
Variability type ()
ELL+RS
Variability period
17.748
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)
−25.06
Proper motion (Dec)
−30.28
Radial velocity
4

OTHER NAMES AND NUMBERS

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

Variable-star designation
V350 Lac
Washington Double Star id
22301+4921

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 (quality C)
[

ALSO KNOWN AS

] 4 DESIGNATIONS
  • HD HD 213389
  • HIP HIP 111072
  • HR HR 8575
  • Variable star V350 Lac
[

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. V350 Lac [catalogue entry]. Data release DR1 (2026-08-21). https://spacecatalog.org/object/hd-213389
BIBTEX
@misc{spacecatalog_hd-213389,
  author       = {{SpaceCatalog}},
  title        = {{V350 Lac}},
  howpublished = {SpaceCatalog, data release DR1 (2026-08-21)},
  year         = {2026},
  url          = {https://spacecatalog.org/object/hd-213389},
  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.

[

RELATED OBJECTS

] 8 LINKED