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The sky keeps score whether we watch or not. These update as the survey does — loading…
Worth looking up
Nearly everything in this catalog is far too faint for human eyes — magnitude 18 to 20, thousands of times below what binoculars reach. But not everything in the sky plays by that rule.
T Coronae Borealis — the once-in-80-years star
In the Northern Crown, near Arcturus, sits a magnitude-10.8 speck: a white dwarf slowly siphoning gas off a red giant companion. Roughly every 80 years the stolen gas detonates, and for about a week the system surges three-thousand-fold to magnitude 2 — as bright as the North Star, visible to the naked eye from any backyard on Earth. It last erupted in 1946, and astronomers have had it on any-night-now watch since 2024.
Our survey camera can't warn you — T CrB is already too bright for it. The first to know will be the world's amateur observers: watch its live light curve at AAVSO. When it goes, this site will treat it as the front-page story it will be.
Every entry is a machine classification with a probability attached, not a certified discovery. That's the deal with reading the sky in real time: you're seeing science mid-sentence.