hip-115444

Its story

66 Pegasi is an orange K-type giant, peering out from 388 light-years in the neck of the Winged Horse. Its amber tone sets it apart from the whites and blues of the Square of Pegasus, that vast rectangle so recognisable in the autumn sky. To find it is an exercise in naked-eye stellar chromatography: compared to its brighter neighbours, the temperature difference shows. Its light set out in the early seventeenth century, in the thick of the Scientific Revolution.