Lyra

Although Lyra dominates the summer skies of the Northern Hemisphere, I was a little late capturing it,  this image was taken in October 2025. Its brightest star, Vega, shines as a crisp blue-white beacon just 25 light-years away, one of the nearest and brightest suns in our night sky. For thousands of years it has guided travellers, poets, and astronomers alike, once the North Star in ancient times, and destined to take that role again in about thirteen thousand years as Earth’s axis slowly shifts.

Lyra itself takes its name from the lyre of Orpheus, the musician of Greek myth whose melodies could charm even stones and move the hearts of the gods. When Orpheus was slain, Zeus placed his lyre among the stars, immortalising the beauty of his music. The Babylonians, however, saw these same stars differently, to them it was a vulture descending from the heavens, which is where Vega’s Arabic name Al Waqi‘ (“the swooping eagle” or “vulture”) originates.

Within this small constellation lies a wealth of wonders. Close to Vega sits the Double Double, or Epsilon Lyrae,  two stars that split again into four under a telescope, a graceful dance of gravity and light. And nestled between Sheliak and Sulafat, the two blue giants forming the body of the lyre, lies one of the sky’s true treasures: the Ring Nebula (M57). I managed to just pick it out with my Askar 180mm. Once a sun-like star, it shed its outer layers thousands of years ago, leaving behind a faint white dwarf surrounded by a glowing ring of gas — a haunting glimpse of what awaits our own Sun in the distant future.

This is my first attempt at a four-panel mosaic using my modified Canon D700. I’ve been experimenting with the settings — 15 × 120-second exposures at ISO 800 — though I could probably push it to ISO 1600.

I initially struggled with noise, which appeared as vertical banding across the image. I think I’ve solved that by introducing dithering every two frames. I started by dithering only along the RA axis, but I’ll now dither on both RA + DEC to further reduce noise. There’s also a PixInsight script that helps correct banding, but I’ve learned that proper dithering is even more important when using uncooled cameras.

Each sub was processed in Astro Pixel Processor — cropped, had light pollution removed, denoised, and saved as individual FITS files. These were then re-imported into APP and combined using the mosaic function. After stacking, I brought the final image into PixInsight for stretching.  I then uploaded it to https://astrometry.net/ so I could plate solve. I have issues doing it in PixInsight.  I then loaded it back into PixInsight, for some reason I had to flip the image and then annotated it using PixInsight.

It’s a bit of a palaver, but good practice — especially as I’m planning a much larger 25-panel mosaic of Orion. There’s probably an easier way to do it… but I haven’t found it yet!