HD 75534

STARB1/2Ib blue-white supergiant

ILLUSTRATION FROM SPECTRAL TYPE B1/2Ib · 26 200 K · LUMINOSITY CLASS

[

OVERVIEW

] STAR

HD 75534 is a in the constellation Vela, shining at apparent magnitude 7.83 (). It is catalogued as HIP 43260.

WHAT IT IS
Blue-white supergiant
HOW BRIGHT (V)

Binoculars reach it; the naked eye does not.

WHERE TO LOOK
Vela

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

[

OBSERVING

] FROM WHERE YOU ARE

What it takes to see HD 75534 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 HD 75534 is worth going out for.

[

THROUGH AN EYEPIECE

] 150 MM TELESCOPE · 25 MM EYEPIECE
EYE50MM150MM300MM7.83
TELESCOPE REACHES 13.0

Too 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 ()
7.83 · within reach
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
10.7
PROPER MOTION SINCE
0.15

Computed for 2026-08-27 00:00 UT. Two things separate it from the catalogued position above: HD 75534 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.

[

SPECTRUM

] A SPECTRUM OF ITS TYPE
TYPE SPECTRUM · B1 I

No survey in this catalogue has measured HD 75534’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, B1 I. 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 HD 75534.

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 · NANOMETRESHe INa 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. B1 I — 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 7 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

HD 75534 is a blue-white supergiant near the end of its life; within about a million years it will collapse and explode as a supernova, leaving a neutron star.

  1. COLLAPSING CLOUD
    took about sixty thousand years
  2. MAIN SEQUENCE
    lasted about ten million years
  3. SUPERGIANT
    about a million years of it
    NOW
  4. SUPERNOVA
    bright for weeks, over in a second
  5. NEUTRON STAR
    for 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 sixty 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 ten 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 a million 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.
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, 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 HD 75534 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, and is rounded to a single figure: they are orders of magnitude and none of them is a date.

[

CATALOG DATA

] 6 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

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)

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)
−3.86
Proper motion (Dec)
4.21
Radial velocity
0

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 (1978MSS...C02....0H, quality D)
[

ALSO KNOWN AS

] 2 DESIGNATIONS
  • HD HD 75534
  • HIP HIP 43260
[

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. HD 75534 [catalogue entry]. Data release DR1 (2026-08-21). https://spacecatalog.org/object/hd-75534
BIBTEX
@misc{spacecatalog_hd-75534,
  author       = {{SpaceCatalog}},
  title        = {{HD 75534}},
  howpublished = {SpaceCatalog, data release DR1 (2026-08-21)},
  year         = {2026},
  url          = {https://spacecatalog.org/object/hd-75534},
  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