hip-41395

Its story

In Puppis —the stern of the ancient ship Argo— shines a K-type star, orange and serene, somewhat cooler than the Sun. Its light departed at the start of the eighteenth century, when minuets were danced at Versailles and Jesuit astronomers were drawing the first precise maps of the southern sky. Almost three centuries later, that same light —which knows nothing of empires or borders— reaches the night at last.