hip-50027

Its story

19 Sextantis shines orange about four hundred and sixteen light-years away, in the Sextant —one of the youngest constellations in the catalogue, drawn by Hevelius in honour of the instrument he lost in a fire. Its K-type atmosphere reaches us warm and deep, with the aged light of a star that has already left stability behind. Few celestial figures owe so much to the humble persistence of a seventeenth-century astronomer.