From Blue Supergiant to Red Dwarf

In the new season at our observatory, we focus on the great color palette of our night sky — from blue supergiant to red dwarf. We present beautiful examples of the different types of stars, how they are born, and how they meet their end. We also explain in which constellations you can find these stars. Often, we were able to choose stars that are clearly visible to the naked eye. You will never look at the night sky the same way again.

Hertzsprung-Russell diagram

If you look at the sky, you’ll see that some stars are brighter than others. Someone who studies the stars very closely will also notice that some stars have different colors. With telescopes, this can be examined much more thoroughly, and scientists have recorded the brightness and color of millions of stars in a diagram — the so-called Hertzsprung–Russell diagram. This famous diagram reveals a pattern from which the entire life cycle of a star can be determined.

Today, we know that our night sky is filled with the strangest kinds of stars. Some stars are enormously larger than our Sun, while many others are much smaller. There are stars far hotter than our Sun, but others that are much cooler. Still others resemble our Sun and, like our Sun, have planets.