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Lyra
Lyra (the Lyre) is one of the constellations in the Summer Triangle, which its bright star Vega (Alpha Lyrae) forms together with Deneb in Cygnus and Altair in Aquila.
Lyra contains one of the most interesting double-stars to observe. Epsilon Lyrae is known as the "Double-Double" for reasons which become obvious when you see it.
Lyra starfield
This shows the constellation of Lyra together with a large number of milky way stars.
Move the mouse over the picture to see the captions, move it away to hide them.
This picture was taken with an SLR camera using a 50mm lens, with an exposure of 10 minutes at F5.6. It is a detail of the milky way picture Here.
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02 August 2004: Epsilon Lyrae
Epsilon Lyrae is located near to the bright blue star Vega. When viewed with a telescope it becomes obvious it is a double star, in fact I have heard it said that the pair can be resolved with the naked eye. However push up the magnification and each star in the pair is shown to be a double itself, with each pair oriented approximately at a right angle to the other.
This picture was taken using the TouCam through my 216mm f5 Newtonian, with a 2x Barlow lens giving an effective focal ratio of f10. To make this image I stacked around 200 frames in Registax 2.
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Daves Astronomy Pictures
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