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Its story

Within the coils of Ophiuchus, the Serpent-Bearer, shines a white type A star, hotter and more luminous than the Sun. Its light took nearly 195 years to arrive: it set out when Goya painted his black paintings and post-Napoleonic Europe reshaped its borders at the Congress of Vienna. It still lights with an incandescent coolness the shoulders of the snake-bearer, that mythic giant who holds the healer of the sky between Hercules and Scorpius.