This doesn’t look like much, but these are RR Lyrae variable stars! They’re 10,500 light years way! I took about half of these pictures, and my classmates took the other half. I took the data and ran it through a few Python programs and made them into a gif! The observing period here was unfortunately only about 2 hours, but we got some good data!

The two stars here that are RR Lyrae variable stars are V* BH Peg and V* BG Peg (circled in the image below, BH Peg is the top star and BG Peg is the bottom).

RR Lyrae Variable stars are stars that are nearing the end of their life, and their luminosity changes periodically. There are non-RR Lyrae Variable stars that can have periods of years, or they may fluctuate irregularly.

RR Lyraes are really cool though!  RR Lyraes are pulsating aging stars with a mass of around half the Sun’s. They’re thought to have previously shed mass during the Red-Giant Branch phase, and consequently, they were once stars with similar or slightly less mass than the Sun. Because of this, they’re super easy to use to gauge distances in our galaxy and local globular clusters (blobs of stars). But what’s even crazier is that they have periods of between 40 and 0.3 days. That’s super fast, cosmically speaking!

Oh! and the bottom star is an Eclipsing Binary! That means that one blob is actually two stars, and because of our vantage point from earth, they cross in front of each other!

V* BH Peg has a period of 0.6 days, and V* BG Peg has a period of 1.9 days.