All stars are special. Some of them, of course, may capture our imagination more than others. For example, I'm a known lover of the Garnet Star (Mu-Cep). In many pictures I see, imagers tend to "deal with" and "manage" stars, rather than featuring them. How many of us have cursed Alnitak, or 52 Cygni for example?

I've decided to give stars even more of their due than I already do. When I have a few extra hours to image--since I don't do multi-night projects at present--I will image and feature a prominent and interesting star. Here, in the summer, with barely two hours of bona fide night time, I suspect I will catalog a number of such objects.

Concurrently, I will be working on my post-processing skills, trying to capture the wonder of these stars. Stars, as we all know, present special problems in post, and whether you're intent on minimizing them or featuring them, there are things to learn!

The first star of this series is Denebola, β Leonis. Located in the constellation Leo about 36ly from Earth, Denebola is a very, very young star, clocking in at only about 300 million years. Life on Earth was already evolving, crawling onto land when Denbola was born. For those interested in spectral classes (isn't everybody?), it is an A3Va and is therefore a magnificent luminous dwarf, sporting a strong bluish-white color. Its other main attributes can be summed up as follows: 1.78 M☉, 1.73 R☉ and 15.0 L☉. It's not the brightest star in the sky, but it does outshine our Sol lumen for lumen.

Denebola has other interesting characteristics. It is a variable star (Delta Scuti type), changing it's luminosity by minute amounts up to a dozen times a day! If you image this star for an entire evening, you might hope to see a difference in one of your subframes... It also rotates 50 times faster than Sol, which results in a noticeable equatorial bulge--well, not noticeable in my image!

Most interesting to me, perhaps, is that our luminous baby is spewing excess IR, indicative of a circumstellar disk of dust, gases and planetesimals, which extends some 39AU out from the star. This is the stuff from which planets can be born! Perhaps there is an Earth-like planet in Denebola's future!

If you've read this far, some of you might be curious about the name Denebola. The name is a concatenation of two arabic words that mean "Lion's tail". The name, obviously, bears a close resemblance to Deneb, our friend in Cygnus (also a Class A star). Both stars (and a few others, like Aldhanab), are all named using the Arabic root d-n-b which means 'tail'. The same root also means 'sin', 'misdeed', 'guilt' or 'fault', a fact to me which is just as interesting as the star itself! Almost. Incidentally, the Arabic words for 'henchman' and 'comet' also derive from this same root. 'Comet' makes sense; they have tails. 'Henchman' I will leave for you to ponder.

I've seen hundreds of beautiful images of the myriad galaxies near this star, but haven't yet seen the star itself deliberately imaged. I can't say that I did this blue baby justice, but I've tried. I hope you like it and, as always, thank you for stopping by, taking a look and taking your time to leave me a comment.