HIP 82398

STARYellow-white star

ILLUSTRATION FROM MEASURED TEMPERATURE · 5990 K · 0.99 L☉ · VARIABLE, MAG 11.12–11.36 · TIMING NOT TO SCALE

[

OVERVIEW

] STAR

HIP 82398 is a yellow-white star in the constellation Hercules, 621.3 from Earth, shining at apparent magnitude 11.26 ().

WHAT IT IS
Yellow-white star
HOW FAR
621.3

The light arriving now left it that long ago.

HOW BRIGHT (V)

A small telescope reaches it.

WHERE TO LOOK
Hercules

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

[

THE MODEL

] CATALOGUED RADIUS
OUTSIDE THE SURVEYED VOLUME · DRAG TO ORBIT

CALCULATED · NOT AN OBSERVATION · CATALOGUED RADIUS · MEASURED TEMPERATURE · 5990 K · 0.99 L☉ · VARIABLE, MAG 11.12–11.36

Drawn from the catalogued radius 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 ARE

What it takes to see HIP 82398 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 82398 is worth going out for.

[

THROUGH AN EYEPIECE

] 150 MM TELESCOPE · 25 MM EYEPIECE
NE
1.1′ ACROSS

Out of reach of binoculars; a 150 mm telescope reaches it. Its brightest companion sits 25.3″ away, which at 48× is cleanly split.

48×
1.08
1.25
13.0
· AC
25.3 · cleanly split
· AB
18.6 · cleanly split
APPARENT MAGNITUDE ()
11.26 · within reach

A is where the pair was the year it was measured — the ones above, between 2021 and 2021, and a pair in a real orbit has moved since. The brightest companion — AC — is 5.8 magnitudes down on the star itself, which makes it a harder split than the angle alone suggests: the glare of the brighter one is what you are separating it from.

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
16.1
PROPER MOTION SINCE
10.6

Computed for 2026-08-27 00:00 UT. Two things separate it from the catalogued position above: HIP 82398 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.

[

DOUBLE STAR

] 2 PAIRS
COMPONENTSSEPARATIONPOSITION ANGLEMAGNITUDEMEASURED
AB18.6″188°19.72021
AC25.3″38°17.12021

Separation and position angle are as measured in the year given; a position angle is measured from north, through east. Washington Double Star Catalog 16502+2219.

[

LIFE OF THIS STAR

] STAGE 2 OF 5

HIP 82398 is a yellow-white star on the main sequence, fusing hydrogen in its core — about ten billion years of it in all — and when that hydrogen is gone it will swell into a red giant, and end as a white dwarf.

  1. COLLAPSING CLOUD
    took about sixty million years
  2. MAIN SEQUENCE
    about ten billion years in all
    NOW
  3. RED GIANT
    about a billion years of it, when it comes
  4. PLANETARY NEBULA
    gone in about twenty thousand years
  5. WHITE DWARF
    cooling 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 sixty 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 ten 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.
RED GIANTabout a billion 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 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 82398 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 the Sun's own 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

] 13 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.

Surface temperature
5991
Luminosity
0.98992
Luminosity (bolometric)
0.7391
Radius
0.787
Surface gravity (log g)

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)
−148.82
Proper motion (Dec)
−367.18
Radial velocity
0

OTHER NAMES AND NUMBERS

The identifiers other catalogues file this object under, for anyone joining this data to theirs.

Washington Double Star id
16502+2219

WHERE THESE FIGURES CAME FROM

Which catalogue, paper or model each of the fields above was read from, where the source named one.

Stellar parameters from
Gaia DR3 model fit (GSP-Phot, FLAME; RUWE ≤ 1.4)
[

ALSO KNOWN AS

] 1 DESIGNATIONS
  • HIP HIP 82398
[

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 82398 [catalogue entry]. Data release DR1 (2026-08-21). https://spacecatalog.org/object/hip-82398
BIBTEX
@misc{spacecatalog_hip-82398,
  author       = {{SpaceCatalog}},
  title        = {{HIP 82398}},
  howpublished = {SpaceCatalog, data release DR1 (2026-08-21)},
  year         = {2026},
  url          = {https://spacecatalog.org/object/hip-82398},
  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