hip-30436

Its story

In Canis Major shines an orange giant whose light has been on its way for more than a thousand years. When it set out, copyist monks were illuminating manuscripts in medieval scriptoria and al-Andalus was flourishing with libraries and observatories where Ptolemy's astronomical treatises were being translated. It is a K-type star with a surface cooler than the Sun, yet swollen and luminous, an old distant ember crossing space while entire civilizations are born and fade beneath it, unaware of its slow flicker.