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Its story

Reticulum, that southern grid born of the eighteenth-century telescope, hosts an orange star whose light set out a hundred and forty-seven years ago, just as Edison was patenting the incandescent lamp and the world was learning to illuminate itself anew. Its surface, cooler than the Sun’s, gives it that amber tone typical of ageing giants. Although astronomically close, its modest apparent brilliance reminds us that visible magnitude depends as much on intrinsic fire as on the distance between two gazes.