Bob Moler's Ephemeris Blog

Ephemeris for Friday, June 28th.  Today the sun will be up for 15 hours and 31 minutes, setting at 9:31.   The moon, 2 days before last quarter, will rise at 12:43 tomorrow morning.  Tomorrow the sun will rise at 6:00.

One of the first stars visible when twilight fades  is Vega.  It will be east of the zenith and is perfectly white. Another bright star with a yellow-orange hue is to the west of the zenith.  That’s Arcturus.  We’re concentrating on Vega now.  It is in a small constellation called Lyra the harp or lyre.  Just off to the southeast of Vega as it gets dark is a narrow parallelogram of stars that make up the body of this celestial instrument.  A dim star next to Vega completes the constellation.  Take good look at it in binoculars and the star near Vega appears as two.  It’s Epsilon Lyrae.  Each can be split again in a telescope.  Lyra has another wonder, but that will have to wait for another time.

Times are for the Traverse City/Interlochen area of Michigan.  They may be different for your location.

Addendum

Magnified view of Lyra. Created using Stellarium.

Epsilon Lyra is the closest star to Vega.  Look closely, because it’s double.  The funny characters next to “Lyr” are lower case Greek letters Epsilon is the Greek letter “e”.  The one next to it is the slightly brightest star of the pair.  The Greek letter designations are from Johannes Bayer’s 1603 atlas.  The number designations are Flamsteed numbers.  There’s other stars with proper names.  The HIP number is from the Hipparcos catalog, a relatively new catalog.