hip-42286

Its story

Beneath the southern keel of Carina burns an orange K-type star. Its light departed three hundred and thirty-eight years ago, when Edmund Halley was urging Newton to write the «Principia» and science was taking a decisive turn. Cooler than the Sun, its glow arrives coppery and composed, like a lantern lit in the crow's nest of a vanished sail. To see it tonight is to lean over the dawn of modern physics.