Star Stars · In Pegasus
Scheat
Scheat, β Pegasi, is a red bright giant in Pegasus: the 89th brightest star in the night sky.
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- Constellation
- Pegasus
- Designation
- β Pegasi
- Apparent magnitude
- 2.44 · 89th brightest star in the night sky
- Spectral class
- M2II-IIIvar
- Distance
- 196 light-years
- Highest at midnight
- early September
- Position (J2000)
- RA 23h 04m · Dec +28° 05′
A red bright giant, around 3,400 K, like Betelgeuse and Antares. About 42× brighter than the faintest star the eye can see. Gives off about 320 times the Sun's visible light. The light you are seeing left around 1830.
When to see it
On the night of Sat 4 Sep 2027, when it is highest around midnight, on each city’s own clock:
| From | Rises | Highest | Sets |
|---|---|---|---|
| London GMT+1 | 16:21 | 01:10 · 67° | 09:58 |
| New York EDT | 17:16 | 01:04 · 78° | 08:53 |
| Singapore GMT+8 | 19:13 | 01:15 · 63° | 07:17 |
| Sydney GMT+10 | 19:31 | 00:06 · 28° | 04:41 |
Common questions
- Can I see it from 50° north?
- Yes. It rises and sets, and at its highest it stands 68° up in the south.
- Can I see it from 35° south?
- Yes. It rises and sets, and at its highest it stands 27° up in the north.
- When is the best time of year to see it?
- Around early September, when it stands opposite the Sun and is highest at midnight. It comes round about two hours earlier each month, so by early December it is highest in the early evening, and in early June not until the hours before dawn.
- How far away is it, and how bright?
- It is 196 light-years away, and shines at magnitude 2.44 in our sky. From that far, the Sun would be a star of magnitude 8.7: too faint for the eye, a target for binoculars.
- Naked eye, binoculars or telescope?
- The naked eye, even from a city: at magnitude 2.44 it is brighter than the faintest stars a city sky still shows, about magnitude 4.5.
Look for
Start from Alpheratz: Scheat is 14° west of it, a fist and a half at arm’s length.
Look for
From 50° north it climbs to 68°; from 35° north it climbs to 83°; from the equator it climbs to 62°; from 35° south it climbs to 27°.
Science
Scheat’s surface is about 3,400 K, some 2,400 K cooler than the Sun’s 5,772 K, so its light is strongest at about 850 nm, in the infrared, past the red end of what the eye can see, where the Sun’s is strongest at 500 nm. Moved to 33 light-years, the distance astronomers compare stars at, it would shine at magnitude −1.5, about as bright as Sirius looks to us.
Did you know
Against Alpheratz, the brighter star the hop starts from: Alpheratz looks 1.4 times as bright as Scheat in our sky, but Alpheratz is 97 light-years away and Scheat 196 light-years, so side by side Scheat would give off 2.9 times as much light as Alpheratz.
Science
Scheat is the 83rd nearest to us of the 156 stars on these pages with a measured distance. Its nearest neighbour among them in space is Matar, about 26 light-years from it; on our sky the two are 5.0° apart.
Look for
The Sun passes 31° south of Scheat around early March, when it is highest at noon, in daylight: the weeks either side are its worst time of year. From 50° north it is above the horizon for about 17 hours a day, from 35° north about 15 and from 35° south about 9. It is 29° from the plane of the Milky Way.