Rana

Its story

Rana is a very close neighbour, just 29 light-years away, along the long meander of the celestial river Eridanus. Its name, Latin for «the frog», comes from Bayer's translation of an archaic Arabic astronomical term. It is an orange K-type giant, slightly variable, that has already exhausted the hydrogen in its core: a miniature preview of the fate awaiting the Sun in five billion years' time. The light visible tonight left it before the Berlin Wall came down.