Hi, I'm Shannon Silverman, astrophysicist at the Clay center.

And welcome to Almost Heavens.

Here in West Virginia.

We're just about halfway between the North Pole and the equator.

That means we are in the perfect spot to view everything the northern skies have to offer.

And even a little of the southern skies, too.

During the fall, several constellation are in prime viewing position.

One constellation in particular contains two notable stars, or more accurately five the constellation Cygnus.

This one is quite large, but made up of mostly faint stars with one major exception.

Deneb.

The tail of the Swan.

Along with the stars Vega and Altair, Deneb makes up one corner of the Summer triangle, an asterism basically an unofficial constellation used for navigating the night sky.

If you can find Vega, the second brightest star of the summer sky, you can find Deneb, as it's the only other bright white star nearby.

Deneb is one of the brightest stars in the summer sky and the 19th brightest star overall, despite likely being over 2000 light years away.

This is because Deneb is an incredibly large and luminous type of star called a blue supergiant, estimated to be 55,000 times brighter than our sun at the very least, but incredibly massive stars like Deneb have very short lives.

Despit being only 12 million years old, Deneb has already left the main sequence, the main phase of the star's life.

Whereas our much smaller sun is nearly 5 billion years old and still has another 5 billion or so left in the main sequence.

Another star in Cygnus is also very interesting.

The star is the head of the swan and can be found either throug following the shape of sickness or through using the summer triangle.

Imagine a straight line from Vega to Altair formin one side of the summer triangle.

Now look at Deneb and imagine a line from Deneb to the midpoint of the Vega Altair line.

Look just inside the triangle, slightly closer to Deneb, and you'll find Albireo.

Albireo is a faint star, but it's very interesting to look at with just your eye.

You may notice Albireo doing something strange.

It twinkles like many other stars, but the twinkles are different colors.

Blue than orange than blue than orange.

With even a small telescope you can magnify the star enough to see why this happens.

Albireo isn't one star.

It's two.

Ones large and yellow orange.

The other is smalle but bright and distinctly blue.

This makes Albireo both one of the easiest and one of the most striking objects to observe, especially for those new to stargazing.

However, you'd need a much, much more powerful telescope to reveal yet another secret about these stars.

The orange one, Albireo A, is actually three different stars in itself.

Thank you for joining.

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Until next time.