Tau-1

Its story

Tau-1 Serpentis burns with a deep red in the head of the Serpent, that constellation split into two halves and held between the hands of Ophiuchus. It is a red M-type giant, a star well advanced in its evolution, swollen to colossal dimensions and cooled at the surface to barely three thousand degrees. Its light has been crossing space for nearly seven centuries: what we see tonight set out while all of Europe was dying under the Black Death of the fourteenth century.