RR Pic
ILLUSTRATION FROM VARIABLE, MAG 12.18–12.63 · TIMING NOT TO SCALE
OBSERVING
FROM WHERE YOU AREWhat it takes to see RR Pic 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 RR Pic is worth going out for.
THROUGH AN EYEPIECE
150 MM TELESCOPE · 25 MM EYEPIECEOut of reach of binoculars; a 150 mm telescope reaches 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 ()
- 12.39 · within reach
APPARENT PLACE
EQUINOX J2026.8Where 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
- 2.0
- PROPER MOTION SINCE
- 0.17
Computed for 2026-10-23 00:00 UT. Two things separate it from the catalogued position above: RR Pic 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. The catalogue it came from publishes no error for that position, so nothing here says how far this arithmetic can be trusted — the digits above are as precise as the place they were computed from, and no more. Aberration, parallax and refraction are left out. Aberration swings every position by up to twenty arcseconds over a year; parallax stays under an arcsecond for all but the nearest stars; refraction is nothing overhead and about half a degree at the horizon, where it answers to the air, not the sky. The same figure for any date.
VARIABILITY
SLOW NOVA- RANGE, AS SAMPLED
- 12.18 – 12.63
No period is published for this star, so there is no cycle to count. The catalogue records that it varies and by how much, and not how often.
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 and the epoch are the General Catalogue of Variable Stars’s. These elements as data.
CATALOG DATA
10 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
- Variability
- Slow nova
- Variability type ()
- NB
- 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.
- 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)
- 4.32
- Proper motion (Dec)
- −4.47
- 0
OTHER NAMES AND NUMBERS
The identifiers other catalogues file this object under, for anyone joining this data to theirs.
- Variable-star designation
- RR Pic
ALSO KNOWN AS
2 DESIGNATIONS- HIP HIP 31481
- Variable star RR Pic
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.
- SIMBADHIP 31481
Cross-identifications, measured values and the reference behind each of them.
- ADSobject:"HIP 31481"
Papers indexed against this object rather than against the string, newest first.
- VizieR5″ around 98.9002 -62.6401
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. RR Pic [catalogue entry]. Data release DR1 (2026-08-21). https://spacecatalog.org/object/hip-31481
@misc{spacecatalog_hip-31481,
author = {{SpaceCatalog}},
title = {{RR Pic}},
howpublished = {SpaceCatalog, data release DR1 (2026-08-21)},
year = {2026},
url = {https://spacecatalog.org/object/hip-31481},
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.
That catalogue asks for this acknowledgement: HYG Database v4.1, Astronexus (github.com/astronexus/HYG-Database). Fields derived from it stay under CC BY-SA 4.0.