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Its story

In Volans —the Flying Fish of the southern sky— dwells an orange K-type star, cooler and older than the Sun. Its light spent some two hundred ninety-seven years reaching us: it set out when telescopes were only beginning to multiply in the cabinets of Enlightenment Europe. It glows in that warm hue, almost like aged copper, that astronomers associate with stars well into their lives. A quiet flame in a constellation christened by sixteenth-century mariners.