Deep Sky Objects in Lyra (L2/M57, M56)

.....There are two Messier objects in Lyra, and the up side to Lyra's small size is that I can fit the entire constellation figure on the finder chart for both objects. Lyra contains one of the most impressive, and easiest to find, Messier objects.

Messier 57 / Leckenby 2: The Ring Nebula

.....The Ring Nebula, aka M 57, aka NGC 6720, aka L2 (my designated second object on the "Leckenby list", my list of deep sky objects that a starting observer has a really good chance to locate) is located between the bottom two stars of Lyra, Sulaphat and Sheliak. In a good pair of binoculars, the Ring Nebula can be seen a little bit closer to Sheliak than Sulaphat.
...In a telescope, the Ring appears as a, well, ring. The Ring Nebula is a "planetary nebula" (due to its round appearance), and in the simplest model of a planetary nebula, it represents what will someday happen to the Sun. When nuclear fusion finally stops at the core of the Sun, the core will collapse without that energy being added to it, and that collapse will release energy that will bounce off the outer part of the Sun like an expanding soap bubble. As it turns out, things are a little bit more complex; the Ring isn't actually a spherical bubble of gas, but more of a cylinder that we are looking at edge-on.

.....Below are two images, one of which might be a mistake to include. The one on the left is a sketch I made of the Ring Nebula through my personal telescope. This is probably fairly close to how this object might look to the typical backyard observer. The other image is a Hubble image of the Ring. This object will *never* look like this in your backyard, I'm sorry.

Messier 56

.....Messier 56 isn't viewed as often as, say, the Ring Nebula, because M56 is a globular cluster, and there are dozens of globular clusters visible during the summer. Given a choice between M56, and something like the Hercules Cluster or M5 in Serpens, most people will go for one of the biggies. The most dramatic globular clusters appear as a bright central blur that resolves itself into individual stars as you get farther to the edge. That resolution does not appear with M56, at least it didn't with me. (The seeing the last night I looked at it was not the clearest, however.)

.....the Messier Objects were originally compiled into a list by Charles Messier because he was looking for comets, and these were things that kinda looked like comets, but weren't. Author Stephen James O'Meara has noted that M56 is special to him because it has a hazy, comet-like appearance, so it shows what Messier found distracting when he made a list of what we now recognize as a tour of the wonders of the sky when Messier was just trying to list the garbage that kept getting in his way.