ABSTRACT
The main constellation is Auriga, which contains Capella, one of the most brilliant stars in the sky. Capella is so far north that it is circumpolar from the latitude of Britain and the northern United States and Canada; it and Vega are on opposite sides of the pole, and at about the same distance from it. Capella is yellow, and is a very close binary; giant telescopes show it as elongated, but in ordinary instruments it looks like a single yellow star. The nebula is illuminated by the star, and is often nicknamed the Flaming Star Nebula; its distance is of the order of 1,600 light-years, and AE itself is a hundred times as luminous as the Sun. The spectrum is of type O, and the range is small, from magnitude 5.8 to 6.1, so that the star is easy to identify on the photograph.
