hip-81008

Its story

29 Herculis is an orange K-type giant about 351 light-years away, in the body of the kneeling demigod. Its warm hue comes from a relatively cool photosphere, well past the main sequence: a late chapter in the life of a star that once looked more like the Sun. Its light, set out around the mid-seventeenth century, now reaches us from the Hercules of Baroque engravings.