Colors of Starlight

Albireo. Source:  Sky and Telescope Credit; Purnendu Gupta

Albireo in the constellation Cygnus is an optical binary star system, best known for its contrasting colors. To the naked eye, it appears as a single star near the beak of Cygnus, the swan, as it flies with its wings spread and neck along the center line of the Milky Way on summer nights. But in almost any small telescope it splits into a striking blue-gold pair. One of the two points of light, yellow-gold Albireo A , is itself a suspected four star system. The primary is a red giant about 60 times larger than the sun. The other, Albireo B, is a blue-white main sequence star

The first image is through a telescope shot on July 12, from my backyard. The second below, showing Albireo in Cygnus and a single meteor in Lyra, was shot with a wide lens in April, 2020