42 Herculis is a single star located around 450 light years away from the Sun in the northern constellation of Hercules. It is visible to the naked eye as a faint, red-hued star with an apparent visual magnitude of 4.86. The star is moving closer to the Earth with a heliocentric radial velocity of −56 km/s. There is an unknown source of X-ray and far ultraviolet emission originating from a location offset by more than one arcsecond from the star. This may indicate there is an undetected main sequence companion.