Mu-2

Its story

Mu-2 Pavonis is an orange K-type giant in the Peacock some 236 light-years away. It belongs to the southern landscape that Dutch navigators charted at the close of the sixteenth century, when the map of the constellations surrounding the south celestial pole was still being completed. Together with Mu-1, it sketches across the peacock’s plumage an optical pair that the eye cannot split but a telescope easily resolves, two orange embers at very different distances, simply aligned by chance along the very same line of sight.