S Cnc
ILLUSTRATION FROM SPECTRAL TYPE B9/A0V+K:III · 10 700 K · 35.4 L☉ · VARIABLE, MAG 8.26–10.34 · PERIOD 9.484 DAYS · PULSE COMPRESSED
OVERVIEW
] STARS Cnc is a B9/A0V+K:III blue-white main-sequence star in the constellation Cancer, 950.9 from Earth, shining at apparent magnitude 8.30 (). It is catalogued as HD 74307 and HIP 42853.
- WHAT IT IS
- Blue-white main-sequence star
- HOW FAR
- 950.9
- HOW BRIGHT (V)
The light arriving now left it that long ago.
Binoculars reach it; the naked eye does not.
THE MODEL
] RADIUS FROM THE LUMINOSITY AND THE TEMPERATURECALCULATED · NOT AN OBSERVATION · RADIUS FROM THE LUMINOSITY AND THE TEMPERATURE · SPECTRAL TYPE B9/A0V+K:III · 10 700 K · 35.4 L☉ · VARIABLE, MAG 8.26–10.34 · PERIOD 9.484 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 AREWhat it takes to see S Cnc 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 S Cnc 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 1.2′ away, which at 48× is cleanly split.
- 48×
- 1.08
- 1.25
- 13.0
- 1.2 · cleanly split
- APPARENT MAGNITUDE ()
- 8.30 · 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 4.1 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.
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
- 22.5
- PROPER MOTION SINCE
- 0.58
Computed for 2026-08-27 00:00 UT. Two things separate it from the catalogued position above: S Cnc 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
- 8.26 – 10.34
- PERIOD
- 9.4844897 days
- PHASE
- 0.493 ± <0.0001
- NEXT MINIMUM
- 2026-08-31 19:21 UT---------- --:-- your time
Computed for 2026-08-27 00:00 UT. A phase of zero is minimum light, and S Cnc was last there 4.68 days before that. The ± is what the published elements can still promise: 560 cycles have gone by since the epoch they were measured at, and the last digit of the period compounds over every one of them — 43 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 |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| — | 72.7″ | 270° | 12.37 | 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 08439+1902.
SPECTRUM
] A SPECTRUM OF ITS TYPENo survey in this catalogue has measured S Cnc’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, B9 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 S Cnc.
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. B9 V — 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 5 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 5S Cnc is a blue-white star on the main sequence, fusing hydrogen in its core — about six hundred million years of it in all — and when that hydrogen is gone it will swell into a red giant, and end as a white dwarf.
- COLLAPSING CLOUDtook about three million years
- MAIN SEQUENCEabout six hundred million years in allNOW
- RED GIANTabout sixty million years of it, when it comes
- PLANETARY NEBULAgone in about twenty thousand years
- WHITE DWARFcooling from then on
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 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.
EVERY STAGE ON THIS TRACK
- COLLAPSING CLOUDtook about three 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 SEQUENCEabout six hundred 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.
- RED GIANTabout sixty million years of it, when it comes
- 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. 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 S Cnc 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 three 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
] 15 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
- Luminosity
- 35.4487
- Variability
- Algol-type eclipsing binary
- Variability type ()
- EA
- Variability period
- 9.4844897
- 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)
- −21.84
- Proper motion (Dec)
- −0.06
- Radial velocity
- 10
OTHER NAMES AND NUMBERS
The identifiers other catalogues file this object under, for anyone joining this data to theirs.
- Variable-star designation
- S Cnc
- Washington Double Star id
- 08439+1902
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 (1993AJ....106.1162O, quality D)
ALSO KNOWN AS
] 3 DESIGNATIONS- HD HD 74307
- HIP HIP 42853
- Variable star S Cnc
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 74307
Cross-identifications, measured values and the reference behind each of them.
- ADSobject:"HD 74307"
Papers indexed against this object rather than against the string, newest first.
- VizieR5″ around 130.9839 +19.0342
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. S Cnc [catalogue entry]. Data release DR1 (2026-08-21). https://spacecatalog.org/object/hd-74307
@misc{spacecatalog_hd-74307,
author = {{SpaceCatalog}},
title = {{S Cnc}},
howpublished = {SpaceCatalog, data release DR1 (2026-08-21)},
year = {2026},
url = {https://spacecatalog.org/object/hd-74307},
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.