hip-102599

Its story

In the northern polar sky, deep within the winding Dragon, glows this orange K-type giant. Close to the world's axis, it never sets for northern observers and traces small eternal circles around the pole. Its light departed around the seventeenth century, when Cervantes was finishing the second part of Don Quixote in Madrid in 1615. Colder and far larger than the Sun, it watches the north like an ancient ember that never tires of turning.