Tau

Its story

Tau Cancri is a yellow giant of type G burning some 274 light-years away, in the body of the zodiacal Crab. A few degrees from it pulses the Beehive, M44 —the open cluster the ancients described as a little cloud and which Galileo, turning his telescope upon it in 1609, first resolved into dozens of individual lights—. Tau shares this celestial neighbourhood, though not that stellar family.