T Lyrae – Hidden ruby of the harp

Deep sky astroimaging season is over, and I finally have some time to process all the data I have captured. The first image I have processed is an image of a the star T Lyrae, which is a very red carbon star. Carbon stars look varying degrees of red due to carbon dust scattering light in the blue and green part of the spectrum. I became aware of these stars from an episode of the skywatcher webcast.

Imaging of stars usually do not produce very distinct images, they mostly look the same. T Lyrae has a very striking color though. I see the nicks Hidden Ruby of the Harp and The jewel in the Harp floating around the web. Quite fitting.

T Lyrae – Crop of 10x15s exposures using RGB filters on my Quattro 8″ using a Starizona nexus CC/Reducer and ASI1600MM Mono camera.

This star varies from magnitude 7.84 – 9.60 according to Stellarium (7.5 – 9.2 V says AAVSO) . This means it is not visible without aid, but it should be possible to see in binoculars, and it should be easy in my 10 inch dobson telescope.

I hope I get a chance to try to observe it visually this autumn, and I am planning to image more of these to make a small collection.

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Jonas

Hacker and developer that loves to explore topics related to informatics, software engineering, mathematics, graphics, games, science.

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