The very bright star a third of...

The very bright star a third of the way up the eastern sky at 9 p.m. is Arcturus, the brightest star in Bootes the Herdsman and the third-brightest star visible from Los Angeles. Arcturus is the giant orange-yellow star, 20 times the diameter and 110 times the luminosity of our sun. With a distance of only 37 light years (215 trillion miles), it is the closest giant star to Earth. Arcturus moves through space at 300,000 mph, much faster than any other bright star, and in a few tens of thousands of years it will have moved into the constellation Virgo.

Source: John Mosley, Griffith Observatory