Aldhanab

Its story

Aldhanab shines with cool blue light from 211 light-years away in Grus, the crane, one of the figures introduced into the southern sky during the Renaissance. A class-B star, young and hot, its colour betrays surface temperatures far above the Sun's. Its Arabic name, «al-dhanab», the tail, did not originally belong to the crane but to earlier silhouettes, proof of how celestial drawings shift across centuries and peoples.