HIP 703

STARRed star

ILLUSTRATION FROM COLOUR INDEX B−V 1.50 · 3790 K · VARIABLE, MAG 10.12–12.21 · TIMING NOT TO SCALE

[

OVERVIEW

] STAR

HIP 703 is a red star in the constellation Octans, shining at apparent magnitude 11.01 ().

WHAT IT IS
Red star
HOW BRIGHT (V)

A small telescope reaches it.

WHERE TO LOOK
Octans

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

[

OBSERVING

] FROM WHERE YOU ARE

What it takes to see HIP 703 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 HIP 703 is worth going out for.

[

THROUGH AN EYEPIECE

] 150 MM TELESCOPE · 25 MM EYEPIECE
EYE50MM150MM300MM11.01
TELESCOPE REACHES 13.0

Out 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 ()
11.01 · 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
9.0
PROPER MOTION SINCE
0.21

Computed for 2026-08-28 00:00 UT. Two things separate it from the catalogued position above: HIP 703 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.

[

LIFE OF THIS STAR

] STAGE 2 OF 3

HIP 703 is a red dwarf on the main sequence, and it will stay there for eighty billion years — many times longer than the universe has so far existed — before fading to a white dwarf without ever becoming a giant.

  1. COLLAPSING CLOUD
    took about four hundred million years
  2. MAIN SEQUENCE
    about eighty billion years in all
    NOW
  3. WHITE DWARF
    long after the universe as it is now

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 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.

EVERY STAGE ON THIS TRACK
COLLAPSING CLOUDtook about four hundred 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 eighty billion 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.
WHITE DWARFlong after the universe as it is now
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 luminosity class is recorded for this star — the catalogue gives its temperature class and stops there — so which stage it is in was read from how far its brightness sits above where a star of its temperature would sit on the main sequence. That is a best estimate rather than a classification.
  • ALSO 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 HIP 703 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 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, 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.

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)
4.79
Proper motion (Dec)
6.34
Radial velocity
0
[

ALSO KNOWN AS

] 1 DESIGNATIONS
  • HIP HIP 703
[

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. HIP 703 [catalogue entry]. Data release DR1 (2026-08-21). https://spacecatalog.org/object/hip-703
BIBTEX
@misc{spacecatalog_hip-703,
  author       = {{SpaceCatalog}},
  title        = {{HIP 703}},
  howpublished = {SpaceCatalog, data release DR1 (2026-08-21)},
  year         = {2026},
  url          = {https://spacecatalog.org/object/hip-703},
  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