Lam

Its story

Lambda Hydri hides inside the small Male Water Snake, a southern constellation created by the Dutch navigators Keyser and de Houtman at the close of the sixteenth century during their voyages to the East Indies. It is an orange K-type giant 212 light-years away, a star deep in its late evolutionary phase whose amber tone contrasts with the white of the neighbouring constellations. Its light belongs to a sky that the Greek or Roman astronomers never saw: it only entered stellar charts with the age of the great circumnavigations.