hip-83262

Its story

30 Ophiuchi is an orange giant 405 light-years away, a K-type star that has burned through its core hydrogen and is swelling toward maturity. It lives in Ophiuchus, the vast constellation mythology ties to the healer Asclepius, crossed by the ecliptic and by dark dust clouds where new stars are forming. Its light departed near the end of the sixteenth century, before Galileo first pointed his telescope skyward.