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Its story

Cassiopeia — that unmistakable double-v silhouette — also harbours this white A-type star, young and hot, whose light took about 350 years to arrive. It set out when seventeenth-century astronomers were patiently drawing the first detailed maps of the Moon — Riccioli, Hevelius — and naming its seas and craters with Latin words. Today this white light reaches us after exactly that span, a reminder that while humans map what is near, starlight goes on quietly making its own invisible journey.