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What Are Some of the Stars You Can See Through a Telescope?

Just looking up at the night sky in a low light area presents us with hundreds of stars in various patterns and constellations. Bringing even a very small telescope into the equation increases this number greatly. Through a telescope you will begin to notice smaller, hidden stars that have become lost in the magnitude of their larger neighbors. You will also begin to notice the contrasting colors and sizes of stars you previously thought of as pin pricks of light.

Albireo
- Albireo is a double star in the Cygnus galaxy, a group of stars named for the swan into which the Greek god Zeus turned to in order to seduce the wife of the King of Sparta. Albireo is at the head of this swan. With the naked eye, Albireo is indeterminable as a double star, but under the magnification of a small telescope, the stellar duality becomes clear. There is even a sharp color contrast between the two bodies, with one glowing with white light and the other shining a sharp yellow.
Gamma
- Locarted in the Andromeda galaxy, the nearest galaxy to us outside our own Milky Way, Gamma Andromadae is a double star consisting of an enormous primary star and its much smaller partner. The Arabic name for Gamma Andromedae is Almaak; a reference to a sort of wildcat found in the Middle East. When viewed through a small telescope, the disparity in size between the two stars becomes clear, as does the golden yellow hue of the larger star, contrasting with the deep blue of its partner.
Epsilon Lyrae
- Epsilon Lyrae is a fascinating set of stars. One of the brightest stars in the Lyre galaxy, Epsilon is in fact a pair of pairs. The two components of Epsilon have been individually named Epsilon1 and Epsilon2 and -- despite being about 1.6 light years apart -- are physically connected, meaning they orbit together. The individual pairings are also physically connected and orbit each other as they make their way around the galaxy. The stars in Epsilon1 take around 12000 years to complete an orbit around one another, while Epsilon2 takes 585.
Alcor
- In the middle of the Big Dipper constellation is the bright star, Mizar. This is a double star visible to the naked eye. Nearby is the much smaller star, Alcor, which glows orange in the night sky. Despite being very far from one another, Mizar and Alcor form an optical pair when viewed with the naked eye and require a small telescope to differentiate between the two. An optical pair is what occurs when two stars fall into the same line of sight when viewed from Earth. This creates a sort of eclipse effect, rendering one star unviewable.

Astronomy