Over my nearly 50-year astronomy career, I’ve read more than a few books on the subject.
If you asked me to name my favorite, you might be surprised to learn it isn’t even an astronomy book but rather an inspirational and romantic autobiography by the late Leslie Peltier, amateur astronomer extraordinaire.
Peltier’s charming book, Starlight Nights, recounts passionately his love for stargazing and how, as a wide-eyed child one spring, he read about — and met — his very first star.
“According to the descriptive text,” he writes, “Vega, at that very hour in the month of May, would be rising in the northeastern sky. I took the open book outside, walked around to the east side of the house, glanced once more at the diagram by the light that came through the east window of the kitchen, looked up toward the northeast and there, just above the plum tree blooming by the well, was Vega. And there she had been all the springtimes of my life, circling around the pole with her five attendant stars, fairly begging for attention, and I had never seen her.
“Now I knew a star!”
What a marvelous experience for anyone, young or old, to learn their first star, but Peltier’s lyrical writing makes it even more magical.
And if you’ve never met Vega, this would be a great week to do so. The star is again making its appearance over the northeastern horizon after dark, just as it did for young Peltier so many decades ago.
Meeting a star, though, is just the beginning. Getting to know it can be even more fun.
Vega, for example, is the brightest star in the small constellation Lyra (the harp) and is also the brightest of the three outlining the huge summertime asterism known as the Summer Triangle.
You may notice Vega seems to twinkle more than other stars. That’s because when a star hangs low in the sky, its light must pass through six times more of the Earth’s turbulent atmosphere than it does when it shines high overhead.
Vega has more than twice the size and mass — and produces about 40 times the power — of our sun.
As a result, we expect it will exhaust its fuel in only one-tenth of the time, making its predicted life span only about 1 billion years.
Another interesting fact about Vega is that it someday will replace Polaris as our North Star. This happens because our planet wobbles like a spinning top over about 25,800 years.
The result is that, between A.D. 13,000 and 14,000, Vega will move to within only six degrees of the north celestial pole.
When you see Vega, you’ll be looking in the direction that our sun and solar system are racing at about 12 miles per second.
Don’t lose sleep over this, though; there’s no chance of a collision. Vega lies about 25 light-years from us (some 150 trillion miles), so it would take us nearly 4,000 centuries to travel that distance.
I hope you’ll follow Peltier’s lead this spring and get out to meet the amazing star Vega!