hip-4346

Its story

Cetus stretches, enormous, across the northern autumn sky, occupying a vast celestial band at low latitudes. There glows this orange sun — cold and generously surfaced — whose light took about 602 years to arrive. It set out when Gutenberg was beginning to assemble his movable-type press in Mainz, unaware that the machine would forever change how knowledge circulated in the world. That orange light, reaching us from so far back in time, seems to carry something of that threshold between two human ages.