hip-17296

Its story

In the northern Giraffe pulses a white variable star whose light has crossed 519 years to reach us. When it left, the Dutch were proclaiming their independence and the Golden Age of the Netherlands was beginning to light up Europe with Vermeer and Rembrandt in gestation. A class-A sun, hotter and brighter than ours, it modulates its glow with a heartbeat of its own —a living beacon among the septentrional constellations.