Atik

Its story

Atik is a hot, faintly variable blue supergiant set on the shoulder of Perseus. Its name, from the Arabic «al-ʿātiq», means precisely «the shoulder». At 1,121 light-years, it is among the most distant stars the unaided human eye can perceive: the light shining tonight set out during the ninth century, when the astronomers of Baghdad were translating and expanding Ptolemy's Almagest.