Betelgeuse
Star
A red supergiant in one of the last stages of a massive star's life, and one of the few stars whose surface telescopes have actually seen.
Can you see it tonight?
Where are you?
To work out whether you can see this tonight, we need to know roughly where you are looking from. Your position stays in your browser: it is never sent to us, never stored and never shared.
Without it, everything else on this page still holds: what this object is, where it sits on the sky, and where every fact came from.
What it looks like
No photograph here. Betelgeuse is bright enough to overwhelm the camera that took these pictures, which was built to record very faint things. What comes back is a blaze of light from the instrument rather than a picture of the star.
Where we draw that brightness line is our own judgement, not a published standard.
- Position
- 88.79290, 7.40690Source: Yale Bright Star Catalogue
- Distance
- Too far for this catalogue to measure
- Brightness
- about 0.5Source: Yale Bright Star Catalogue
- Spectral class
- M1-2Ia-Iab
- Surface temperature
- about 3,200 KWorked out by us from the spectral class
- Constellation
- OrionSource: Yale Bright Star Catalogue
Catalogue designations
HR2061
Source: Yale Bright Star Catalogue HR number