hip-105811

Its story

69 Cygni belongs to the rarest set of Flamsteed stars charted at distances exceeding the Milky Way itself: placed at some 326,000 light-years away, it still shines at magnitude 5.93 within the field of the Swan. For a B-class star to remain visible to the naked eye from such an abyss, its luminosity must exceed the Sun's by orders of magnitude —the mark of an extreme supergiant. The light settling on the eye tonight left its atmosphere long before the last glacial period.