Baten Kaitos

Its story

Baten Kaitos means «the belly of the sea monster» in Arabic and lies in the middle of Cetus, the creature that in Greek myth besieged Andromeda chained to the rock. It is an orange giant 235 light-years from the Earth, with warm, ancient light, suspended calmly in the middle of a region of sky thinly populated with bright stars. Its name still survives today as a direct relic of the Islamic astronomers who methodically charted the entire sky when Europe was only just relearning how to read Aristotle in Latin translation again.