# Vega (Alpha Lyrae)

Vega (Alpha Lyrae) is a star in the constellation Lyra, magnitude 0.0.

**The star that set the brightness scale — the first ever photographed, and a pole star past and future.**

Vega spins so fast — about 236 km/s at its equator — that it bulges into a flattened ball, hotter at the poles than around its middle. We happen to look almost straight down on one of those poles. With 2.1 times the Sun’s mass, it is only a tenth of the Sun’s age, yet it will also live only a tenth as long: both stars are now about halfway through their lives.

Astronomers have called it arguably the most important star in the sky after the Sun. In 1850 it became the first star ever photographed, on a daguerreotype at Harvard. In 1872 Henry Draper photographed its spectrum, the first such picture to show absorption lines. For many years it helped define [magnitude](https://astropilot.space/glossary/magnitude) zero, the starting point of the brightness scale.

Infrared telescopes found that Vega gives off more heat than a bare star should. The excess comes from a disc of dust, ground out by collisions like those in our Kuiper belt. JWST has since shown the disc to be remarkably smooth, with no sign of giant planets carving it.

Vega (Alpha Lyrae) is 25 light-years away: the light we see from it set off in 2001, 5 years before Pluto was reclassified as a dwarf planet.

## Did you know?

- **The falling eagle.** Vega comes from the Arabic an-nasr al-wāqi’, ‘the falling eagle’. Its neighbour Altair is the flying one.
- **Pole star past and future.** Earth’s slowly wobbling axis pointed near Vega around 12,000 BC and will do so again around AD 14,000. It is the brightest of all the northern pole stars.
- **The Weaver Girl.** In the Chinese legend of the Cowherd and the Weaver Girl, Vega is Zhinü, kept apart from Altair by the river of the Milky Way. Once a year magpies form a bridge so the lovers can meet — Japan’s Tanabata festival.
- **An early distance.** Friedrich von Struve published a parallax for Vega, one of the first attempts to measure a star’s distance. He later doubted it, yet his first value was close to today’s.

A brilliant blue-white star, the brightest corner of the big triangle it makes with Deneb and Altair. The small parallelogram of Lyra hangs beside it. Nearby Epsilon Lyrae, the Double Double, splits into two in binoculars.

## When and where to see it

It is best placed in the evening sky around July, when it crosses the meridian at about 10 pm local time (around midnight in June). It can be seen from everywhere north of 51°S and never sets north of 51°N.

At its highest it stands 79° up from 50°N, 86° up from 35°N, 51° up from the equator, 16° up from 35°S.

## Facts

- Type: Star
- Constellation: Lyra
- Designations: Alpha Lyrae, α Lyr, 3 Lyr, HR 7001, HD 172167, HIP 91262
- Magnitude: 0.0
- Position: RA 18h 36.9m, Dec +38° 47′ (J2000)
- Spectral type: A0V
- Colour: white (B−V 0.00)
- Distance: 25 light-years
- Discovered: Known since antiquity

Open AstroPilot to see when Vega (Alpha Lyrae) is highest tonight from your location, how easy it is with your telescope or binoculars, and an eyepiece view. https://astropilot.space/object/vega