hip-56473

Its story

90 Leonis burns from afar —nearly nineteen hundred light-years away— as a hot blue B-type star within the Lion, that stately zodiacal figure that reigns over spring skies. Its surface reaches temperatures far above the Sun's, and from such a distance its modest naked-eye glow conceals an enormous intrinsic luminosity. The light arriving tonight set out in the second century, when Ptolemy was compiling in Alexandria the Almagest on which astronomy would rest for fourteen hundred years.