Altair ( Alpha Aquilae, Alpha Aql, α Aquilae, α Aql, Atair ) is the brightest star in the constellation Aquila and the twelfth brightest star in the night sky.

A study with the Palomar Testbed Interferometer revealed that Altair is not spherical, but is flattened at the poles due to its high rate of rotation.

Altair is located 16. 7 light-years ( 5. 13 parsecs ) from Earth and is one of the closest stars visible to the naked eye.

Altair is a type-A main sequence star with approximately 1. 8 times the mass of the Sun and 11 times its luminosity.

This rapid rotation forces Altair to be oblate ; its equatorial diameter is over 20 percent greater than its polar diameter.

Altair is one of the few stars for which a direct image has been obtained.

In this image, North ( the direction towards the North Celestial Pole ) is up and East is left, and the white line is the rotational axis of Altair.

Altair is thus known as (,, or more literally, Riverdrum 2 ).

The Japanese festival, in which Altair is known as, is based on this legend.

The Russian-made Beriev Be-200 Altair seaplane is also named after the star.

The 1956 science fiction film Forbidden Planet is set on Altair 4, a presumed planet of the star.

Altair is the name of three United States navy ships:, and.

In Chinese mythology, there is a love story of Qi Xi () in which Niu Lang (, Altair ) and his two children ( β and γ Aquilae ) are separated from their mother Zhi Nü (, lit.

** Altair 8800 is released, sparking the microcomputer revolution.

There is a rather abrupt onset of X-ray emission around spectral type A7-F0, with a large range of luminosities developing across spectral class F. Altair is spectral type A7V and Vega is A0V.

Today the Altair is widely recognized as the spark that led to the microcomputer revolution of the next few years: The computer bus designed for the Altair was to become a de facto standard in the form of the S-100 bus, and the first programming language for the machine was Microsoft's founding product, Altair BASIC.

The name Altair has been used since medieval times.

The NASA Constellation Program announced Altair as the name of the Lunar Surface Access Module ( LSAM ) on December 13, 2007.

These companies were forced to refer to the system as the " Altair bus ", and wanted another name in order to avoid naming their competitor when describing their own system.

Its name comes from the Arabic phrase " shahin-i tarazu ", meaning " the balance "; this name referred to Altair, Alshain, and Tarazed.

The first generation of satellites was created by NPO-PM using the satellite platform " KAUR-4 " ( its first use ) and had the code name " Altair " ( index GUKOS-11F669 ).

* Altair is the name of a dragon in the video game Spyro The Dragon

The boat Bond uses — The Altair — was the name of the boat Amis and his wife used on holiday, whilst the Bond girl's fictitious colleagues, " Legakis " and " Papadogonas " were friends who helped Amis in Greece, whilst the doctor who treats Bond in Chapter two was named after Amis and Jane's own doctor.

is the Japanese name for the star Altair, also known as or in Japanese.

The Altair 8800 was one of the first microcomputers intended for home use.

His company was Processor Technology, one of the most successful Altair compatible board suppliers.

* α Aql ( Altair ) is the brightest star in this constellation and one of the closest naked-eye stars to Earth at a distance of 17 light-years.

Two major novae have been observed in Aquila: the first one was in 389 BC and was recorded as being as bright as Venus ; the other ( Nova Aquilae 1918 ) briefly shone brighter than Altair, the brightest star in Aquila.

Dec Terminal was one of the first terminal programs for the popular Altair.

It soon was, the authors got one of the first Altair computers and designed an interface for the camera.

The March 1976 issue had the " Pennywhistle Modem " and the July 1976 issue had the " SOL Intelligent Terminal " The SOL, built by Processor Technology, was really an Altair compatible computer and became one of the most successful personal computers at that time.

Because it was the first mass marketed and the first widely copied calculator, its design marks the starting point of the mechanical calculator industry, which eventually morphed into the electronic calculator industry and which, through the accidental design of the first microprocessor to be commercialized, the Intel 4004, for one of Busicom's calculator in 1971, led to the first commercially available personal computer, the Altair in 1975.

Felsenstein was one of the original members of the Homebrew Computer Club, which formed in 1975 in response to the appearance of the Altair 8800 computer kit.

In one story, the stars Altair and Vega were said to be two lovers who were allowed to meet only once a year on the seventh day of the seventh month, when a flock of magpies and crows formed a bridge over the galactic river.

Competing machines such as the Altair 8800 generally were programmed with front-mounted toggle switches and used indicator lights ( red LEDs, most commonly ) for output, and had to be extended with separate hardware to allow connection to a computer terminal or a teletypewriter machine.

As Steve Wozniak, the creator of Integer BASIC and the only person who understood it well enough to add floating point features, was busy with the Disk II drive and controller and with Apple DOS, Apple turned to Microsoft, who was the BASIC vendor of choice after their success with Altair BASIC, and licensed a 10 KB assembly language version of BASIC dubbed " Applesoft.

The Arabs greatly increased the knowledge of astronomical cycles, and many of the star names that remain in common use today, such as Aldebaran, Altair, Betelgeuse, Rigel and Vega retain the legacy of their language.

Altair rotates rapidly, with a velocity at the equator of approximately 286 km / s.

Altair possesses an extremely rapid rate of rotation ; it has a rotational period of approximately 9 hours.

Satellite measurements made in 1999 with the Wide Field Infrared Explorer showed that the brightness of Altair fluctuates slightly, varying by less than a thousandth of a magnitude.

False-color image of the rapidly rotating star Altair, made with the MIRC imager on the CHARA array on Mount Wilson Observatory | Mt.

The angular diameter of Altair was measured interferometrically by R. Hanbury Brown and his co-workers at Narrabri Observatory in the 1960s.

realized that Altair would be rotationally flattened, they had insufficient data to experimentally observe its oblateness.

Altair was later observed to be flattened by infrared interferometric measurements made by the Palomar Testbed Interferometer in 1999 and 2000.

This phenomenon, known as gravity darkening or the von Zeipel effect, was confirmed for Altair by measurements made by the Navy Prototype Optical Interferometer in 2001, and analyzed by Ohishi et al.

Medieval astrolabes of England and Western Europe depicted Altair and Vega as birds.

The Koori people of Victoria also knew Altair as Bunjil, the Wedge-tailed Eagle, and β and γ Aquilae are his two wives the Black Swans.