hip-9763

Its story

49 Cassiopeiae burns some 400 light-years away, a yellow G-type sun lodged in the luminous W of the Queen. Hotter and far older than our own, it holds a glow barely perceptible to the naked eye under clean skies. Its light set out in the first third of the seventeenth century —the years when Galileo first turned his telescope toward the stars— and only now completes the journey to the observer's eyes.