● Rigel

  Rigel is a star in Orion.

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  Type            Blue-white supergiant
  Constellation   Orion
  Magnitude       0.1
  Spectral type   B8Ia:
  Distance        about 773 light years
  Double star     components 9.5″ apart
  You need        naked eye from a dark sky

  Known as
  Bayer           β Ori
  Yale            HR 1713

  Physical
  Radius          79 times the Sun

  More information about Rigel

  Rigel outshines Betelgeuse even though Betelgeuse was given the first
  Greek letter of the constellation and Rigel only the second. The
  difference is that Rigel is genuinely luminous rather than merely
  nearby: it puts out something like 120,000 times as much light as the
  Sun, from 860 light years away. Stars this hot and this blue burn
  through their fuel in a few million years, which by the standards of the
  Sun is almost no time at all. Its name has the same origin as
  Betelgeuse's: Rijl al-Jawza' رجل الجوزاء, "the foot of Jawza", against
  Betelgeuse's "hand of Jawza". Orion's two brightest stars are the hand
  and the foot of one body that Arab astronomers saw where the Greeks saw
  a hunter.

  Etymology
  From        Arabic
  Reading     Rijl al-Jawza'  ·  رجل الجوزاء
  Literally   foot of Jawza

  ┌ Greek · Ptolemy, 150
  │ the bright one of the left foot
  │
  ├ Arabic · 9th c.
  │ Rijl al-Jawza', foot of Jawza
  │ رجل الجوزاء
  │
  ├ Latin · c.1250
  │ Algebar, then Rigel
  │
  └ English · now
    Rigel

  Bayer lettered the stars of each constellation in his Uranometria of
  1603, in order of brightness. He was working from Tycho's magnitudes by
  eye, and the order he recorded is often wrong.

  First published in 1930 by Yale astronomer Frank Schlesinger, and
  maintained since, the Yale Bright Star Catalogue lists every star down
  to magnitude 6.5. It contains 9,110 stars.

  where it is tonight:  skymap.sh/Rigel