● Vega

  Vega is a star in Lyra.

                                               
                                               
                                               
                                               
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  Type            White main-sequence star
  Constellation   Lyra
  Magnitude       0.0
  Spectral type   A0Va
  Distance        25 light years
  Double star     components 62.8″ apart
  You need        naked eye from a dark sky

  Known as
  Bayer           α Lyr
  Yale            HR 7001

  Physical
  Radius          2.4 times the Sun, and visibly flattened by its spin

  More information about Vega

  When astronomers set up the modern scale for how bright a star appears,
  they needed a fixed point to measure everything else against, and Vega
  was chosen. That is why its own brightness comes out at almost exactly
  zero. It was the pole star about 12,000 years ago and will be again in
  another 12,000, because the Earth's axis slowly traces a circle rather
  than pointing in a fixed direction. Vega spins so fast that it is
  visibly flattened, bulging at its equator. Its name comes from an-nasr
  al-waqi' النسر الواقع, the falling eagle. Altair is at-ta'ir الطائر, the
  flying one, so two thirds of the Summer Triangle is made up of a pair of
  birds.

  History
  First photographed   1850, Harvard, the first star ever photographed

  Etymology
  From                 Arabic
  Reading              al-Waqi'  ·  الواقع
  Literally            the falling one

  ┌ Arabic · 9th c.
  │ an-nasr al-waqi', the falling eagle
  │ النسر الواقع
  │
  ├ ✕ medieval
  │ the bird is dropped, only 'falling' kept
  │
  ├ Latin · c.1250
  │ Vega
  │
  └ English · now
    Vega

  Bayer lettered the stars of each constellation in his Uranometria of
  1603, in order of brightness. He was working from Tycho's magnitudes by
  eye, and the order he recorded is often wrong.

  First published in 1930 by Yale astronomer Frank Schlesinger, and
  maintained since, the Yale Bright Star Catalogue lists every star down
  to magnitude 6.5. It contains 9,110 stars.

  where it is tonight:  skymap.sh/Vega