hip-80054

Its story

In Norma, the small southern constellation of the carpenter's square, glows a yellow G-type star, a distant sister of the Sun but more luminous. Its light crosses space for around 333 years: what we see today departed about 1693, when Newton had already published the Principia and rewritten the laws of celestial motion, and astronomers across Europe were beginning to see the sky as a mechanism. Norma was drawn by Lacaille in the eighteenth century to honor the tools of the trade.