Bill got up to let the puppy out and throw a few more logs into the wood burning stove about 5:30, this morning, and managed to wake me in the process. I wasn’t sleeping all that well, anyway, and, out of habit, I stumbled to the sliding doors on our deck to check for clear skies and some stars.
In the small window of sky above our house I could see Lyra and its showpiece star, Vega, burning brightly. In a
telescopes, this constellation is known as the home of M57, the Ring Nebula which I have seen, even in small telescopes and even
spotting scopes, as a small round fuzzy disc with as little as 60x, though this planetary nebula can stand much more magnification.
Even 60x, though, is beyond the reach of conventional
astronomy binoculars, even giant astronomy binoculars. That does not mean that the constellation Lyra is lacking in objects for binoculars. In fact, Lyra is loaded with double stars and most are easily split with even
compact binoculars. Those "
binocular doubles" in Lyra were one of the first things that caught my attention when I first turned my binoculars to the night sky, well over forty years, ago. The fact that so many stars that appeared single without
binoculars were, in fact double stars in my binoculars inspired me to turn me to search for other treasures that could be seen in the night sky and I am still searching with my binoculars to this day.