Star profile
HIP 16290
What is HIP 16290
Mensa is a very little-known southern constellation, named in honour of Table Mountain that watches over Cape Town. There glows this yellow star — sibling in tone and temperature to our own Sun — whose light took about 321 years to arrive. It set out when the telescopes of Cassini and Huygens were revealing the rings and moons of Saturn in unprecedented detail, and the sky stopped being a fixed backdrop and became, once and for all, a laboratory. That yellow light still carries something of that opening wonder.
Where it is and when to see it
HIP 16290 lies in the southern celestial hemisphere. It is visible to the naked eye under a dark sky. Its best month of the year is July: the Sun sits at the opposite point of the sky and the star culminates around midnight. How high it climbs above the horizon depends on the latitude you watch from.
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The signature wall
Stelvia's sky works like a signature wall: anyone can leave their name and a message on a real star, and that signature goes up on the map for everyone to read. Signing is free.
A signature without a lock can be replaced by someone else's. The lock makes the signature permanent and lets you choose a symbolic name for the star, always shown next to the star's catalogue identifier. How the lock works
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A public signature from a real person. The chosen name is a symbolic denomination within Stelvia, with no official standing or IAU recognition: the sky is not for sale and belongs to no one.
Astronomical data for HIP 16290
- Constellation
- Mensa
- Apparent magnitude
- 5.68
- Distance
- 320.7 light years
- Coordinates (J2000)
- RA 52.495° · Dec -78.352°
- Catalogue
- HIP 16290 · HD 22676
A symbolic commemorative gift: neither the signature nor the chosen name implies ownership of the star or recognition by the IAU.
Other stars in Mensa
Mensa has 15 stars in Stelvia's catalogue. Here are a few of them.
- Alpha Mensa5.08
- Gamma Mensa5.18
- Beta Mensa5.30
- Zeta Mensa5.61
- Pi Mensa5.65
- Delta Mensa5.67
- Nu Mensa5.78
- HIP 261695.79