hip-82806

Its story

On the southern Altar, the small constellation dedicated to the sacrificial ara of the ancients, shines a white A-type star four hundred seventy light years away. Its light began its journey around 1556, the year Charles V abdicated in Brussels and retired to the monastery of Yuste, marking the end of an imperial era in Europe. Hotter and more luminous than the Sun, it shines with a clean, sharp white, fixed in the southern skies seldom seen by northern observers.