hip-37364

Its story

About 622 light years away, in the rich southern Puppis, an orange K-type star shines amid a dense sea of stars. Its light departed around 1404, when the Medici were beginning to consolidate their power in Florence and the Italian Renaissance was taking root. Cooler than the Sun and bathed in a warm glow, it shares its family with many orange giants that fill the southern skies. Puppis, once part of the great Argo, lends it a stage full of open clusters and nebulae, one of the most fertile regions of the firmament.