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Its story

In the discreet constellation of Sculptor, devised by Lacaille in the eighteenth century, shines an orange K-type giant six hundred fifty light years away. Its light departed around the fourteenth century, when Petrarch was composing his Canzoniere in Tuscany and opening the way to the European literary Renaissance. Colder and far larger than the Sun, it offers its coppery glow to southern observers, fixed in the austral corner where the Sculptor's imaginary chisel carves in silence.