hip-48519

Its story

At 929 light-years, in the modest Sextant — traced by Hevelius to honor the instrument destroyed by fire in his observatory — burns a red giant whose light set out at the start of the twelfth century, amid the rise of the first European universities. Its cool atmosphere, swollen with age, radiates a deep red. A serene flame in one of the least visited constellations of the sky.