August 2013 Constellation of the Month -- Lyra

Lyra can be easily found by locating the brightest and northernmost star in the huge and prominent  Summer Triangle of stars.  This star is Vega in the constellation Lyra.   Lyra is a very small constellation compared with the two constellations which sandwich it – Cygnus to the East and Hercules to the West.  Besides Vega, Lyra's most noticeable feature is an almost perfect parallelogram formed by four stars of roughly similar brightness.  In mythology, Lyra represents a Lyre, which is a type of hand-held harp

You can't see it with the naked eye, but the diagram above shows the location of the Ring Nebula, M57.  This is rightly the most famous "planetary nebula" in the sky.  Nebulae are immense clouds of gas, and planetary nebulae those that appear to be spherical or ring-like in shape.  Whereas nebulae like the Orion Nebula are birthplaces to many stars, planetary nebulae are usually the remains of a star that has exploded. 

Lyra's other notable deep-sky object is the globular cluster of stars, M57. It has over 30,000 stars, with a total diameter of about 85 light years. Globular clusters have some of the oldest stars in a galaxy.  They were formed outside the disk of the galaxy (where our sun and most other stars in our galaxy are located), before the huge cloud of gasses making up the disk coalesced into individual stars.