Lyra, the Lyre Home

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Orpheus is said to be the mortal son of one of the Muses, Kalliope, and the slightly obscure Tracian River God, Oeagrus.  Kalliope means 'Lovely Voice' and she is considered the Goddess of epic poetry.  It is not surprising, therefore, that Orpheus became a supreme musician and singer who could entrance the whole of nature.  He married the nymph, Euridice, who soon afterwards was bitten by a snake and died.  (Although the nymphs were the offspring of Gaia, they were long-lived but not immortal.)  Orpheus was so distressed that he determined to go down to the Underworld and bring her back from the dead.  He used his music first to charm Charon who ferried him across the Styx and then Kerberos, the watchdog, who allowed him the enter.  When he reached the abode of Hades and Persephone he pleaded for his wife in song and so charmed the entire world of the dead that Hades and Persephone could not refuse his request to take Euridice back to the land of the living, but they made one condition.  He was to lead the way and at no time look back until they both reached the light of the Sun.  It is a long climb up from the Underworld (see the footnote on my myths page), and, shortly before reaching the light, Orpheus, fearing that his wife might be tiring, glanced back and she promptly faded back into the darkness.  He went back down but Charon refused to ferry him across the Styx and he had to return to Earth alone.  So distraught was he that he wandered the land refusing to look at any other woman.  The women of Thace were so resentful about this that they tore him to pieces and scattered the parts far and wide.  The birds, the beasts and even the trees and the rocks wept for Orpheus.  His head was thrown into the river Hebros whence it was carried, still singing, to Lesbos whose inhabitants buried it and were rewarded with skills in music and poetry.  The Muses gathered up the other parts of the body and buried them at Pieria where Orpheus was born.  Orpheus' spirit went back to the Underworld where he found Euridice and could spend eternity with her without any fear of looking at her.  Meanwhile Zeus immortalised his music by putting his lyre (originally given to Orpheus by Apollo) into the sky as the constellation Lyra.

The constellation contains only one star brighter than third magnitude (Vega, α-Lyrae, magnitude 0.03), but it is close to the milky way and contains a multitude of fainter stars (see below).  Two of the brighter stars, δ and ε, are easy doubles.  Indeed δ's separation is over 10 minutes of arc and is easily resolved in my picture.  The separation is too great for my colour camera at prime focus of my LX200, but there is a nice colour difference—the brighter component is red and the dimmer is blue-white.  ε can be resolved into a double with binoculars (indeed it too is resolved in my picture above) but each star is itself a double and can be resolved with a small telescope.  These four stars have the same proper motion so are presumably associated.  ζ is another fairly easy double with a separation of 44 arc-seconds.
Between β and γ is the beautiful Ring Nebula, M57, too faint (magnitude 9.3) to show on my picture.  Outside my picture but in the constellation is the globular cluster M56.

The picture was taken with my Canon 1000D DSLR with a focal length of 75 mm, an exposure of 10 seconds at f/4, ISO 1600 and an Orion Skyglow filter.  The background was removed in PhotoImpact and reduced to size in two steps with a small unsharp mask (1 pixel, factor 50) applied each time.

In order to get a wider-angle picture, I fitted the camera with a Zenit 58-mm lens.  This lens protrudes too far into the body of the camera to allow me to include the filter, but I was able to remove the red background in PhotoImpact before reducing it to 16% of its original size.  The original was taken with a 10-second exposure at f/2.  You can see how rich this area is in stars. 

Doubles in Lyra

There are many doubles in Lyra and pictures of a few of them are shown below.  They are all taken at prime focus with a DFK 21AF04 camera so are to the same scale.  In most cases my camera is aligned with my telescope which itself is aligned to the pole, so north is at the top.  However the separation of ε-Lyrae is close to the limit my camera can handle in the north-south direction, so I rotated it approximately 40° in order to put the two components diagonally across the picture and ensure I got them both in.  The true orientation is shown in the inset.  The two pairs Struve 2470 and 2474 are only about 10 arc-minutes apart and so this pair can also be considered as a double double.  10 arc-minutes is too great for my standard optics (which gives me about 5 × 4 arc-minutes), so I cannot show them together.

There are, I think, five Struve catalogues, but the more important ones are those created by father and son, Friedrich and Otto von Struve.  Both are called Struve so confusion can arise because, for example, Struve 525 can mean either of two stars.  To distinguish, Friedrich's catalogue entries are prefixed with STF and Otto's with STT.  In my pictures below, Struve refers to the STF catalogue.

I have great difficulty rendering the colours of stars in my images.  I am not sure if this is because the image of a star is too small to cover enough pixels for the colour camera to render the colour properly, or possibly that the final image does not cover sufficient pixels on the display device, or maybe the colours are just too subtle.  In addition, if the magnitudes of the two stars are very different, then the exposure needed to show the secondary star causes the primary to be so over-exposed that it appears white.  When I imaged STT 525 I tried to remedy this by making an image slightly out of focus.  I then used this to colourise an in-focus image by the LRGB technique.  This still did not work well, but the result on STT 525 can be seen by moving your mouse pointer over the image.  Since enhancement in stacking software (such as wavelets in RegiStax) also tends to saturate images of stars, I colourised an original un-enhanced picture taken with an exposure that did not saturate the primary.  Consequently the secondary is very faint.  There is no doubt that the primary is orange and the secondary blue, at least compared to one another.

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