Celestial hemisphere:  Northern  ·  Constellation: Lyra (Lyr)  ·  Contains:  4 eps01 Lyr  ·  5 eps02 Lyr  ·  The star ε1Lyr  ·  The star ε2Lyr
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The Double Double in Lyra, lowenthalm
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The Double Double in Lyra

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The Double Double in Lyra, lowenthalm
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The Double Double in Lyra

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Well, I seem to be on a double star kick the last couple of weeks. I have a lot of stuff in progress, but bright double stars are an interesting target at dusk before I can do deep sky object imaging and don't involve capturing a lot of data and stacking. So, here is my next double star, Epsilon 1 and 2 Lyrae!

Despite some wind gusts, seeing was excellent and transparency was freakishly good as well at about half an hour before astronomical dusk when I captured the pair of images that went into this image. Despite the short exposures and not quite dark sky, a few faint PGC galaxies actually showed up! I captured two live-stacks with different gains to capture the bright double nearly split and the dimmest stars and then combined them. Both images were 1 minute live-stacks composed of 120 half second subs.

The upper pair in the double-double is Epsilon1 Lyrae orbit one another in 1804.41 years at a distance from us of 162 light years, while the lower pair, Epsilon2 Lyrae, orbit one another in 724.31 years at a distance from us of 156 light years. They wide pairs are far enough apart from each other that they probably don't orbit each other, but I suppose they formed together in the same open cluster. This seems to be the latest data, but I suggest checking out the Wikipedia entry for the latest distance data and separation of the components, as this will get updated with better data as it accumulates:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epsilon_Lyrae

At the time I captured this image, the separation was about 2.2 arc seconds, putting their centers just over 4 pixels apart in this image.

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  • The Double Double in Lyra, lowenthalm
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    The Double Double in Lyra, lowenthalm
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Description: Seemed to lose saturation at the end of processing the first version, so I bumped it a bit here.

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The Double Double in Lyra, lowenthalm

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