At magnitude 3.9, Alpha Horologii is the brightest star in the constellation, located 115 (±0.5) light-years from Earth. German astronomer Johann Elert Bode depicted it as the pendulum of the clock, while Lacaille made it one of the weights. It is an orange giant star of spectral type K2III that has swollen to around 11 times the diameter of the Sun, having spent much of its life as a white main-sequence star. At an estimated 1.55 times the mass of the Sun, it is radiating 38 times the Sun's luminosity from its photosphere at an effective (surface) temperature of 5,028K.