hip-48348

Its story

In Vela, another fragment of the ancient Argo sailing across the southern sky, an orange K-type star shines about 323 light years away. Its light departed around 1703, when Peter the Great was founding Saint Petersburg in the Baltic marshes. Cooler than the Sun and bearing a gentle amber tone, it belongs to the same family as many of the giants that fill modern catalogues. Its steady pulse matches the apparent stillness of those eternally unfurled sails, which mythological imagination saw swollen by sidereal winds.