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Its story

The circumpolar Dragon, coiling its body between the two Bears, holds an orange star whose light set out three hundred and eight years ago, when Newton was publishing the second edition of his Principia. It is an ageing giant with a surface cooler than the Sun’s, which gives it that soft copper colour of embers. It belongs to the stars that never set for northern observers, eternal sentinels guarding the pole. Through binoculars its warm tone becomes unmistakable, almost human.