HR 1

A white star in Andromeda, to the south of the 'W' shape of Cassiopeia. HR 1 is extremely faint; its visual magnitude of +6.7 means that it is impossible to detect with the naked eye. This is a ternary or triple star system, a little over five hundred light years from the Solar System.

What makes HR 1 significant (specifically from the perspective of an observer on Earth) is the rather arbitrary factor of its coordinates on the Celestial Sphere. It happens to fall very close to the Celestial Meridian (with a right ascension of 00h05). As star catalogues typically register their stars in increasing order of right ascension, this particular star is registered as number '1' in the Bright Star Catalog. Two fainter stars precede it in the more extensive Henry Draper Catalog (HD 1 in Cepheus and HD 2 in Cassiopeia), but even so, from the full catalogue of nearly a quarter of a million stars, HR 1 also achieves the number of HD 3.