hip-34215

Its story

Monoceros is a modern constellation, devised in the seventeenth century to fill the space between Orion and Canis Major. There glows this red M-type star — cold and swollen, dyeing its light in warm tones. Its light took about 992 years to arrive: it set out when Europe was living the schism between Rome and Constantinople, and the Christian kingdoms were definitively splitting between West and East. Today that deep red, reaching us from a millennium back, recalls how slow truly cosmic events can be.