Lepus crouches beneath Orion's feet as the hare of the hunt, its stars modest and its brightest carrying the Arabic name Arneb. A much fainter star nearby earned its own nickname for a single, startling property: its colour.
R Leporis, known as Hind's Crimson Star after the British astronomer John Russell Hind who observed and described its intense colour in 1845, is a carbon star, a class of aging stars whose outer atmosphere is rich in carbon compounds that absorb blue light and let through mostly red, producing a colour deeper and more saturated than almost any other star visible through a small telescope or binoculars. Its brightness also varies considerably over a period of roughly fourteen months, so that the star is sometimes easy to find and strikingly obvious in colour, and at other times faint enough to miss.
Carbon stars of this kind are relatively rare and are prized by amateur observers precisely for how startling the colour looks compared to the white or pale yellow of most naked-eye stars, a visual effect that needs no instrument beyond a modest telescope to appreciate, unlike most of the deep-sky objects that require long exposure photography to show any colour at all.
The hare fleeing beneath the hunter and his dogs carries, tucked into its outline, one of the most vividly coloured single stars an amateur astronomer can point a telescope at.