Eta-1

Its story

Eta-1 Pictoris peeks out from the Painter, that small southern constellation invented by Lacaille in honour of the artist's easel. It is a yellowish-white F-type star 85 light-years away, a relatively close neighbour whose light takes less than a century to reach us: what arrives tonight set out while the embers of the First World War were still smouldering. It shares the sky with its celebrated neighbour Beta Pictoris, one of the first stars around which a giant planet was directly photographed.