Tau Ceti — Star in Cetus

Tau Ceti is the closest solitary G-class star to the Sun — a G8 V dwarf 11.9 light-years away in the head of Cetus, magnitude 3.50. Slightly smaller and cooler than the Sun, it is metal-poor with about 28 % of the Sun's iron abundance. Long-term radial-velocity surveys have identified four candidate planets, two of which may orbit within the conservatively defined habitable zone.

Unmistakable to the naked eye — one of the brightest stars in Cetus and easy to identify south-east of the head asterism. Best seen in autumn and early winter. The stellar disc itself shows nothing unusual at the eyepiece; the appeal is the knowledge of its proximity and possible worlds.

Long a fixture in the imagination of astronomers as a likely "Sun-like" host: in 1960 Frank Drake's Project Ozma pointed the 26-metre Green Bank dish at Tau Ceti and Epsilon Eridani — the first deliberate SETI search. No signal was found, but the choice of targets was prescient: both stars remain among the most observed nearby G-K dwarfs.