Sceptrum

Its story

Sceptrum takes its name from the «Sceptrum Brandenburgicum», a short-lived eighteenth-century constellation drawn by Gottfried Kirch over the river Eridanus to honour the house of Brandenburg, long since reabsorbed into it and forgotten by modern celestial maps. It is an orange giant 110 light-years away, calm and golden, one of those quiet stars that outlived the constellation that once contained them. The light we perceive tonight set out at roughly the moment Marconi's radiotelegraph first crossed the Atlantic to Newfoundland.