Gam

Its story

Gamma Apodis watches over one of the southernmost corners of the sky, in the Bird of Paradise constellation, invisible from Europe. It is an orange K-type giant about 156 light-years away, cool and swollen, the evolutionary descendant of a star somewhat more massive than the Sun. It belongs to a group of stars first charted by European navigators of the sixteenth century as they crossed the celestial equator.