Procyon
Procyon is a yellow-white star, a little hotter than the Sun, in the constellation Canis Minor. It is a subgiant: a star just beginning to leave the long, steady part of its life.
How far
11 light years
The light you see from Procyon tonight set off about 11 years ago. Everything we know about it is that much out of date.
How bright
7.4 Suns
It gives out 7.4 times as much visible light as the Sun. From the Earth it is the eighth 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 0.40. Smaller numbers are brighter, and the faintest stars the eye can see are about 6.
How hot
About 6,700 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.
ProcyonThe Sun
In your sky now
Working it out…
Its names
- Its own name
- Procyon
- By constellation (Bayer)
- Alpha Canis Minoris
- Hipparcos catalogue
- HIP 37279
- Henry Draper catalogue
- HD 61421
- Spectral type
- F5IV-V
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.