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Its story

The Serpent, that singular constellation split in two by Ophiuchus, hides a yellow-white F-type star 1546 light-years away. Its light set out in the fifth century, when Visigothic peoples were crossing Roman Hispania and settling on the Peninsula. That a point at magnitude 5.94 offers the night a contemporary echo of the founding of the Gothic kingdoms sums up neatly the temporal scale of the deep sky.