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Its story

In Cepheus, the old king condemned to wheel forever around the northern celestial pole, shines an orange K-type star more than twelve hundred light-years away. Its light set out toward the ninth century, when Charlemagne had just died and Europe was fragmenting into the kingdoms that would shape the Middle Ages. Cooler than the Sun yet of millennial travel, its coppery ember adorns the monarch's crown like an ancient jewel arrived from another age.