Vega

A bright blue-white star, almost overhead on summer nights.

🕒 When can I see it?🚀 Travel there

What it is

Bright young star surrounded by a dust disk; was the North Star ~12,000 BC and will be again.

Star: A ball of gas heavy enough to fuse hydrogen in its core. Every kind of thing there is →

How to find Vega

Look in the constellation Lyra.

Best placed and highest overhead from the Northern Hemisphere.

Finding it: The bright anchor of Lyra's small parallelogram shape.

The Planetarium works out where it actually is from your own place and the date — including whether it is above the horizon at all tonight.

Show me Vega in tonight's sky

What you will really see

With your own eyes

A bright point of light — even big telescopes can't show a star as a disc.

Honest, not glamorous — why the pictures here are drawn.

🔭 See it drawn as it looks through a telescope

Worth knowing about Vega

In weight, about twice as massive as the Sun. On the 100-meter-track scale model of the Milky Way, Vega would be about 2.5 centimeters from the Sun -- roughly the size of a grape. Light takes 25 Earth years to get here from Vega, so what you are looking at is Vega as it was 25 Earth years ago.

How bright it is: Shines about 40 times brighter than the Sun.
What it is made of: A bright, young, rapidly-spinning white star surrounded by a disk of dust.; How we know: Extra infrared light beyond what the star itself should produce reveals warm dust grains around it.
What makes it worth knowing: First star ever photographed (1850) and first with a recorded spectrum. Was the North Star ~12,000 BC and will be again in ~12,000 years, due to axial precession.
Its name and its story: In Chinese folklore, Vega is Zhinü the Weaver Girl of the Qixi Festival, separated from her love Niulang (Altair) by the Milky Way.