hip-50103

Its story

Antlia —the Air Pump traced by Lacaille— is among the most subdued constellations of the austral sky. Within it pulses this K-class orange at four hundred and eighty light-years. Its light set out around 1546, in the months when Andreas Vesalius was publishing in Basel the second edition of his De humani corporis fabrica. An anonymous star in a firmament rarely contemplated from northern hemispheres.