hip-38211

Its story

6 Puppis shines warm some 255 light-years away, an orange K-type giant set within the Stern, austral fragment of the ancient Argo Navis. Its light, several thousand degrees cooler than the Sun's, reaches our telescopes amber and serene. The beam now crossing Earth's atmosphere set out in the eighteenth century, when European navigators still used these southern skies to correct their course across the ocean.