hip-45448

Its story

Cutting through the austral south in the constellation Vela, this F-type luminary shines a barely gilded white, somewhat hotter than our own Sun. Its photons set out around 1861, mid-American Civil War, when no telescope in the northern hemisphere could resolve it in detail. It belongs to that strip of stars that prefigure dawns: pale, serene, free of any stridency.