Canopus
Canopus is a yellow-white star, a little hotter than the Sun, in the constellation Carina. It is a supergiant: a very heavy star, swollen to an enormous size and near the end of its life.
How far
310 light years
The light you see from Canopus tonight set off about 310 years ago. Everything we know about it is that much out of date.
At this distance the figure could be out by a tenth or so.
How bright
14,000 Suns
It gives out 14,000 times as much visible light as the Sun. From the Earth it is the second brightest star in the night sky. It is one of the brightest stars in the whole sky, easy to see even from a town.
Astronomers put its brightness in our sky at magnitude −0.62. Smaller numbers are brighter, and the faintest stars the eye can see are about 6.
How hot
About 8,500 K
That is the temperature of its surface, worked out from its colour, so it is a guide and not a measurement. It could be out by a few hundred degrees. The Sun's is 5,772 K. Hotter stars are bluer and cooler stars are redder, the same way a poker in a fire goes from red to white.
CanopusThe Sun
In your sky now
Working it out…
Its names
- Its own name
- Canopus
- By constellation (Bayer)
- Alpha Carinae
- Hipparcos catalogue
- HIP 30438
- Henry Draper catalogue
- HD 45348
- Spectral type
- F0Ib
Where this comes from
Distance, brightness, colour and spectral type are from the HYG star database, version 4.4, by David Nash, shared under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 licence. Its distances are those measured by the Hipparcos satellite. The temperature is worked out here from the colour with the formula of Ballesteros (2012), and the words are written for this site.
To read more: Colour and brightness, How stars live and die, Measuring distance.