Eta

Its story

Eta Antliae lights the small Air Pump, another austral invention of Lacaille's, dedicated to the instrument of Robert Boyle. A white type A star at just 109 light-years, it is among the nearest within its modest figure. It shines in a corner of the southern firmament poor in notable stars, where the sky delivers its silence without grand mythologies or famous asterisms —only the sober geometry that an Enlightenment astronomer traced with simple instruments.