By the numbers:

42 Herculis is the brightest orange star: It is a spectral type M2.5III variable star irregularly ranging from visual magnitude 4.90 and 4.95. Gaia parallax data shows it to be 448±10.76 light years away.

Hiding in the glare of 42 Herculis is its dimmer 11th magnitude blue-white "companion" 27.5 arc seconds below it. Its Gaia designation is Gaia DR2 1410669986758906752. Gaia parallax data shows this is actually a completely unrelated and much more distant star that is 904±4.97 light years away from us. Based on its absolute magnitude and its Gaia estimated surface temperature of 6730K, its a main sequence star of spectral type is F2 or F3, making it about 1.2 times the mass of our Sun.

The dimmer orange star is variable star V906 Herculis with a spectral type of M4III. It varies slowly and irregularly in visual magnitude from 6.52 to 6.65. Gaia parallax data show this star to be 894±24.2 light years away from us.

V906 Herculis is roughly 4 times dimmer than 42 Herculis and twice as far away, so V906 Herculis and 42 Herculis actually have similar absolute magnitudes and surface temperatures of around 3750K. This indicates that both stars are somewhat more massive than our sun and that they are both in their final red giant phases swollen to 100 times the diameter of our Sun. Their late life evolutionary stage is why they both have some brightness variability.



Now for the fun part, which shows in a small way how the Gaia mission (giving excellent distance and motion data) has revolutionized astronomy: Sky Safari (the scope control tool I use) information for these stars is from older double star catalog data, with about the right distances for the two orange stars, but pairing the fainter blue-white star (Gaia DR2 1410669986758906752) with 42 Herculis with an unknown orbital period. Recent Gaia data that I report above is very accurate and shows that the this blue-white star is actually at the same distance as V906 Herculis, but despite this is is still probably unrelated as its proper motion across this sky is a completely different direction from that of V906 Herculis. They are just coincidentally crossing paths. So None of these stars have any relation to one another. They still make a beautiful triple star though!

Even with just 16 minutes of total integration time, numerous distant background galaxy clusters can be seen, especially in the full resolution image.