hip-37428

Its story

Gemini is a familiar constellation of the northern winter sky, dominated by the twins Castor and Pollux, sons of Zeus in mythology. Far from them, in less travelled parts of the figure, glows this orange star — cold and very distant: its light took about 1524 years to reach us. It set out when the Western Roman Empire had just collapsed and the Germanic kingdoms — Ostrogoths, Visigoths, Franks — were redrawing the European map. That orange light has been travelling for fifteen centuries now, oblivious to all the change it has unwittingly witnessed.