hip-1096

Its story

It dwells in Sculptor, a constellation introduced by Lacaille in honour of the sculptor's workshop. It is an orange giant, of K class, swollen and far more luminous than the Sun. Its light has been crossing space for nearly thirteen hundred years —it set out when the first Benedictine monasteries were copying manuscripts in a fragmented Europe and the Abbasids were consolidating their caliphate in the East. It shines with the serene calm of mature stars, quietly presiding over a region of the southern sky relatively sparse in bright lights.