Tau

Its story

Tau Phoenicis is a yellow star nearly 600 light-years away, in the mythical bird that rises from its own ashes. Its brightness barely reaches the threshold of the human eye: under city skies it goes unnoticed, and only from very dark sites does it reveal itself. It is one of the very first entries in the Hipparcos catalogue, HIP 88, near the start of the list that mapped the position of more than a hundred thousand stars in our galaxy.