Celestial hemisphere:  Northern  ·  Constellation: Lyra (Lyr)  ·  Contains:  4 Lyr)  ·  4 eps01 Lyr  ·  5 Lyr)  ·  5 eps02 Lyr  ·  HD173383  ·  The star Double Double I (ε1 Lyr  ·  The star Double Double II (ε2 Lyr
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Double trouble, Andreas Zeinert
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Double trouble

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Double trouble, Andreas Zeinert
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Double trouble

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Description

Epsilon Lyrae is a quite complex system about 162 light years away from us, still not fully understood at present. At the naked eye it seems a single star but with binoculars you can identify a double star system, epsilon1 (North, upper star in the picture) and epsilon2 (south). 208 arcseconds separate them in the sky. Both stars are about 0.166 light years apart and the orbit period is estimated to be more than 400000 years. However a  telescope reveals the twin binary nature of the Epsilon Lyrae system, there is epsilon1 A and B, and epsilon 2 A and B each separated by less than 3 arcseconds which is very difficult to resolve in a 4.5 inch refractor (I did not see any double nature in 0.2s exposure subs of the G filter but it might be feasible with lucky imaging techniques).
Even more, Epsilon2 Lyrae A was discovered to be a binary system using speckle interferometry in 1985, so there are at least five stars in the system. There might be even more components.

https://www.star-facts.com/epsilon-lyrae-the-double-double/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epsilon_Lyrae

This reminds us that stars are often binary systems. There was a theory about a hypothetical second star in our solar system https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nemesis_(hypothetical_star) called Nemesis which could explain periodic mass extinctions of life observed on Earth. It seems that this hypothesis has been dropped.

As nights are quite short in Normandy and with uncertain skies (veils) I decided to try this target for my new 115 mm refractor. A quite quick shot with RGB (25s subs for each filter) for the stars and L (60s) to reveal the background galaxies (a lot of them, some about several 100 millions lys away...), enjoy the full version. Subs of 25s were enough to keep the star colours, colours were calibrated with photometric method in PI. I remember that blue stars are in fact white , and I wanted to keep it like this, only slight boost of the star colours and slight deconvolution. I am delighted that this triplet refractor with one FP51 and one Lanthanum glass provides a very decent correction of chromatic aberration.

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Double trouble, Andreas Zeinert