Easy Lyra doubles

[Ags]

The seeing was appalling tonight, so I gave up on Jupiter and tried out some doubles instead. I wanted easy to find doubles - that is, bright enough to find with my red dot finder.

The parallelogram in Lyra contains three doubles. The closest star in the parallelogram to Vega is Zeta Lyrae, which looks to me like a fairly equal pair of white stars, separated by about the equatorial diameter of Jupiter.

Beta Lyrae, next to M57, is a very unequal and widely separated (60 seconds?) pair of white-blue stars. Apparently it is only a visual double although the brightest member is a true eclipsing binary, a very violent place with egg-shaped stars and accretion discs.

Delta Lyrae is next to Zeta Lyrae and it is the prettiest of the three doubles I looked at. It is a very wide pair (4 minutes separation) comprising an orange and a green-blue member.

[Moonshane]

Plan B like it, like it. the seeing near me was terrible too.

I love Lyra and I agree that Delta Lyrae is stunning - quite a bit of competition with Alberio in my view - my wife showed me this one as she was scanning about with a wide field EP in.

quite a few meteors tonight too.

[Ags]

I was disappointed with the seeing - I was all set to make a proper sketch of Jupiter, but even the NEB was poorly defined last night.

Although I said these are easy doubles to find, last night they were quite difficult to spot. Even with no moon the sky glow was very bright and I could hardly see the points of the parallelogram.

It was fun ditching the goto for an evening and estimating the separations and colors of the doubles and then checking my results online. I was pretty accurate with the separations, but as ever opinions differ slightly on the colors.

[Rob]

I so agree with you on the seeing.. I tried and tried, but Jupiter just stayed as boiling mess.. always tonight

Rob