Praecipua
Praecipua is an orange star, cooler than the Sun, in the constellation Leo Minor. It is a giant: a star that has used up the hydrogen in its core and swollen up.
How far
95 light years
The light you see from Praecipua tonight set off about 95 years ago. Everything we know about it is that much out of date.
How bright
22 Suns
It gives out 22 times as much visible light as the Sun. It can be seen by eye away from bright lights.
Astronomers put its brightness in our sky at magnitude 3.79. Smaller numbers are brighter, and the faintest stars the eye can see are about 6.
How hot
About 4,600 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.
PraecipuaThe Sun
In your sky now
Working it out…
Its names
- Its own name
- Praecipua
- By constellation (Flamsteed)
- 46 Leonis Minoris
- Hipparcos catalogue
- HIP 53229
- Henry Draper catalogue
- HD 94264
- Spectral type
- K0III-IV
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.