hip-41616

Its story

A scorching blue B-type star burns deep within the constellation Vela, dozens of times more luminous than the Sun and many times hotter. Its light began its journey more than two thousand years ago, when Hipparchus of Nicaea was compiling his first stellar catalogue and giving the West the very idea of a magnitude. Tonight, after crossing 2,132 light-years, that ancient blaze finally completes a journey older than the first written maps of the sky.