V453 Oph

STARA5 white star

ILLUSTRATION FROM MEASURED TEMPERATURE · 6160 K · VARIABLE, MAG 10.51–11.49 · PERIOD 81.3 DAYS · PULSE COMPRESSED

[

OVERVIEW

] STAR

V453 Oph is an A5 white star in the constellation Ophiuchus, shining at apparent magnitude 11.09 (). It is catalogued as HIP 85386.

WHAT IT IS
White star
HOW BRIGHT (V)

A small telescope reaches it.

WHERE TO LOOK
Ophiuchus

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

[

OBSERVING

] FROM WHERE YOU ARE

What it takes to see V453 Oph 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 V453 Oph is worth going out for.

[

THROUGH AN EYEPIECE

] 150 MM TELESCOPE · 25 MM EYEPIECE
EYE50MM150MM300MM11.09
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 ()
11.09 · 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
21.0
PROPER MOTION SINCE
0.55

Computed for 2026-08-27 00:00 UT. Two things separate it from the catalogued position above: V453 Oph 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

] RV TAURI VARIABLE (CONSTANT MEAN BRIGHTNESS)
RANGE, AS SAMPLED
10.51 – 11.49
PERIOD
81.3 days
PHASE
0.429 ± 0.180
NEXT MINIMUM
2026-10-12 09:39 UT---------- --:-- your time

Computed for 2026-08-27 00:00 UT. A phase of zero is minimum light, and V453 Oph was last there 34.9 days before that. The ± is what the published elements can still promise: 292 cycles have gone by since the epoch they were measured at, and the last digit of the period compounds over every one of them — 14.6 days 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.

[

CATALOG DATA

] 19 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 IT IS MADE OF

What the object is in itself, rather than how it happens to look from here.

Spectral type
Surface temperature
6157
Luminosity (bolometric)
2347.4854
Radius
33.432
Mass
5.733
Surface gravity (log g)
Variability
RV Tauri variable (constant mean brightness)
Variability type ()
RVA
Variability period
81.3
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)
−6.64
Proper motion (Dec)
−19.57
Radial velocity
0

OTHER NAMES AND NUMBERS

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

Variable-star designation
V453 Oph

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

ALSO KNOWN AS

] 2 DESIGNATIONS
  • HIP HIP 85386
  • Variable star V453 Oph
[

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. V453 Oph [catalogue entry]. Data release DR1 (2026-08-21). https://spacecatalog.org/object/hip-85386
BIBTEX
@misc{spacecatalog_hip-85386,
  author       = {{SpaceCatalog}},
  title        = {{V453 Oph}},
  howpublished = {SpaceCatalog, data release DR1 (2026-08-21)},
  year         = {2026},
  url          = {https://spacecatalog.org/object/hip-85386},
  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