Kepler-942
ILLUSTRATION FROM MEASURED TEMPERATURE · 4860 K
OVERVIEW
] STARKepler-942 is a star in the constellation Cygnus, 705.7 from Earth, shining at apparent magnitude 13.25 ().
- WHAT IT IS
- Star
- HOW FAR
- 705.7
- HOW BRIGHT (V)
The light arriving now left it that long ago.
Faint: it takes a large telescope.
THE MODEL
] CATALOGUED RADIUSCALCULATED · NOT AN OBSERVATION · CATALOGUED RADIUS · MEASURED TEMPERATURE · 4860 K
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 AREWhat it takes to see Kepler-942 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 Kepler-942 is worth going out for.
THROUGH AN EYEPIECE
] 150 MM TELESCOPE · 25 MM EYEPIECENear the faint end of this catalogue: a 300 mm telescope reaches it and a 150 mm one does not. 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 ()
- 13.25 · too faint for this
APPARENT PLACE
] EQUINOX J2026.7Where 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
- 9.8
- PROPER MOTION SINCE
- none published
Computed for 2026-08-27 00:00 UT. No proper motion is published for Kepler-942, so nothing here moves the object; what separates this from the catalogued position above is the coordinate grid turning 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 5Kepler-942 is an orange star on the main sequence, fusing hydrogen in its core — about twenty 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.
- COLLAPSING CLOUDtook about eighty million years
- MAIN SEQUENCEabout twenty billion years in allNOW
- RED GIANTabout two billion years of it, when it comes
- PLANETARY NEBULAgone in about twenty thousand years
- WHITE DWARFcooling 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 eighty 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 twenty 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 two 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.
Which stage Kepler-942 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 a published model fit, 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 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.
- Surface temperature
- 4861
- Radius
- 0.75
- Mass
- 0.81
THE ORBIT
The shape of the path, where the object sits on it, and the instant those figures were true of. An orbit is a fit to observations and drifts away from the real one either side of its epoch.
- Stars in system
- 1
- Planets in system
- 1
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
- NASA Exoplanet Archive composite parameters
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.
- SIMBADKepler-942
Cross-identifications, measured values and the reference behind each of them.
- ADSobject:"Kepler-942"
Papers indexed against this object rather than against the string, newest first.
- VizieR5″ around 294.9551 +44.1500
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. Kepler-942 [catalogue entry]. Data release DR1 (2026-08-21). https://spacecatalog.org/object/kepler-942
@misc{spacecatalog_kepler-942,
author = {{SpaceCatalog}},
title = {{Kepler-942}},
howpublished = {SpaceCatalog, data release DR1 (2026-08-21)},
year = {2026},
url = {https://spacecatalog.org/object/kepler-942},
note = {Catalogue entry, data release DR1 (2026-08-21). Values from NASA Exoplanet Archive (Planetary Systems Composite Parameters).}
}The values above were taken from NASA Exoplanet Archive (Planetary Systems Composite Parameters) — Public domain (NASA). Citing this page does not replace citing that catalogue.