hip-16290

Its story

Mensa is a very little-known southern constellation, named in honour of Table Mountain that watches over Cape Town. There glows this yellow star — sibling in tone and temperature to our own Sun — whose light took about 321 years to arrive. It set out when the telescopes of Cassini and Huygens were revealing the rings and moons of Saturn in unprecedented detail, and the sky stopped being a fixed backdrop and became, once and for all, a laboratory. That yellow light still carries something of that opening wonder.