Matt McIrvin on Nostr: I recall an old kid's book on astronomy that described Alpha Centauri as "actually ...

I recall an old kid's book on astronomy that described Alpha Centauri as "actually three stars close together", but from a visual perspective that's not quite right: Proxima's orbit is so huge that if it were bright enough to see with the naked eye, it wouldn't even look like part of a multiple star system; it'd just be another star in Centaurus. We can't resolve it easily because it's dim.