hip-36547

Its story

In Camelopardalis, a late and little-known constellation, beats a variable red giant of M type. Its light set out almost five hundred years ago, when Copernicus shook cosmology and published that the Earth orbited the Sun. Far cooler and far larger than our daytime star, it pulses slowly, shifting in brightness: it breathes, as old titans do near the end of life. Barely visible to the naked eye, it is a crimson ember throbbing in one of the most forgotten corners of the northern sky.