hip-49812

Its story

17 Sextantis shines with the white light of an A-class star about 596 light-years away, in the small constellation of Sextans, drawn by Hevelius in the seventeenth century in honour of the instrument. Its distance demands a noticeable intrinsic brightness for it still to be visible from Earth. The light we now see left in the early fifteenth century, in the height of the Italian Quattrocento.