hip-71094

Its story

Within Boötes shines a white A-type star, hotter and more luminous than the Sun, casting a sharp, almost crystalline light. Its glow has been travelling for only some two and a half centuries: it set out when eighteenth-century astronomers were measuring the distance to the Sun for the first time using the transit of Venus, an operation coordinated by ships across every ocean. After 240 light-years, that white light arrives as a reminder that the sky, too, was measured thanks to the seas.