CQ Cep
ILLUSTRATION FROM MEASURED TEMPERATURE · 28 700 K · VARIABLE, MAG 8.72–9.13 · PERIOD 1.641 DAYS · PULSE COMPRESSED
OBSERVING
] FROM WHERE YOU AREWhat it takes to see CQ 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.
Say where you are, and this line says when CQ Cep is worth going out for.
THROUGH AN EYEPIECE
] 150 MM TELESCOPE · 25 MM EYEPIECEToo faint for your eyes alone. Binoculars reach it. It will be a point of light in anything: a star is far enough away that no aperture on Earth gives it a width, and all the equipment changes is how easily you find it.
- 48×
- 1.08
- 1.25
- 13.0
- APPARENT MAGNITUDE ()
- 8.86 · within reach
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
- 11.9
- PROPER MOTION SINCE
- 0.14
Computed for 2026-08-27 00:00 UT. Two things separate it from the catalogued position above: CQ 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
] BETA LYRAE-TYPE ECLIPSING BINARY- RANGE, AS SAMPLED
- 8.72 – 9.13
- PERIOD
- 1.641242 days (39.4 h)
- PHASE
- 0.601 ± 0.0010
- NEXT MINIMUM
- 2026-08-27 15:43 UT---------- --:-- your time
- THEN
- 2026-08-29 07:07 UT---------- --:-- your time
- THEN
- 2026-08-30 22:30 UT---------- --:-- your time
Computed for 2026-08-27 00:00 UT. A phase of zero is minimum light, and CQ Cep was last there 23.7 h before that. The ± is what the published elements can still promise: 2,990 cycles have gone by since the epoch they were measured at, and the last digit of the period compounds over every one of them — 2.3 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.
LIFE OF THIS STAR
] STAGE 3 OF 5CQ Cep is a Wolf-Rayet star — a heavy star whose own wind has stripped its outer layers away, leaving the fusing interior bare; within about three hundred thousand years it will collapse and explode as a supernova, leaving a black hole.
- COLLAPSING CLOUDtook about twenty thousand years
- MAIN SEQUENCElasted about three million years
- SUPERGIANTabout three hundred thousand years of itNOW
- SUPERNOVAbright for weeks, over in a second
- BLACK HOLEfor the rest of time
NOW 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.
NEXT 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.
EVERY STAGE ON THIS TRACK
- COLLAPSING CLOUDtook about twenty 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 SEQUENCElasted about three million 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.
- SUPERGIANTabout three hundred thousand years of itNOW
- 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, 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.
- 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 CQ Cep 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 thirty times 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
] 17 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
- Surface temperature
- 28 660
- Radius
- 14.758
- Surface gravity (log g)
- Variability
- Beta Lyrae-type eclipsing binary
- Variability type ()
- EB/WR
- Variability period
- 1.641242
- 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)
- −4.11
- Proper motion (Dec)
- −3.4
- Radial velocity
- −53.4
OTHER NAMES AND NUMBERS
The identifiers other catalogues file this object under, for anyone joining this data to theirs.
- Variable-star designation
- CQ Cep
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 (1996MNRAS.281..163S, quality C)
- Stellar parameters from
- Gaia DR3 model fit (GSP-Phot, FLAME; RUWE ≤ 1.4) — low confidence: above 7,500 GSP-Phot's temperature and extinction are degenerate
ALSO KNOWN AS
] 3 DESIGNATIONS- HD HD 214419
- HIP HIP 111633
- Variable star CQ Cep
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 214419
Cross-identifications, measured values and the reference behind each of them.
- ADSobject:"HD 214419"
Papers indexed against this object rather than against the string, newest first.
- VizieR5″ around 339.2248 +56.9058
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. CQ Cep [catalogue entry]. Data release DR1 (2026-08-21). https://spacecatalog.org/object/hd-214419
@misc{spacecatalog_hd-214419,
author = {{SpaceCatalog}},
title = {{CQ Cep}},
howpublished = {SpaceCatalog, data release DR1 (2026-08-21)},
year = {2026},
url = {https://spacecatalog.org/object/hd-214419},
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.