hip-3521

Its story

The southern Phoenix, sketched by Dutch sailors voyaging to the Indies, hosts a white star whose light crossed two hundred and ten years before arriving. It set out before the Lumière brothers were even born, when photography was just taking shape in Parisian workshops. Hotter and more luminous than the Sun, its surface near nine thousand degrees lends it that pearly, almost mineral tone. Like the mythic bird reborn from its ashes, it seems to drift alone in a discreet patch of the southern sky.