Mu Cephei

Common card · No. 314838

Mu Cephei is a red supergiant star in the northern constellation Cepheus. It is officially named the Garnet Star; Mu Cephei is its Bayer designation, which is Latinized from μ Cephei and abbreviated Mu Cep or μ Cep. This star appears garnet red and is located at the edge of the IC 1396 nebula. It is a 4th magnitude star easily visible to the naked eye under good observing conditions. Since 1943, the spectrum of this star has served as a spectral standard by which other stars are classified. Mu Cephei is more than 100,000 times more luminous than the Sun, and has an absolute visual magnitude of −7.6. It is one of the largest known stars and also one of the most luminous and massive of its kind, with a radius around 760 times that of the Sun (R☉), and were it placed in the Sun's position, it would engulf the orbit of Mars and the asteroid belt.

Read on Wikipedia · Image Cepheus_constellation_map.png: Torsten Bronger. derivative work: Kxx (talk), CC BY-SA 3.0