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.

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 one of Sheik Ilderim's horses in Ben Hur.

* 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 Summer Triangle is an astronomical asterism involving an imaginary triangle drawn on the northern hemisphere's celestial sphere, with its defining vertices at Altair, Deneb, and Vega, being the brightest stars in the three constellations of Aquila, Cygnus, and Lyra.

The Processor Technology static RAM board drew more current than the MITS dynamic RAM board and two or three boards would tax the Altair 8800 power supply.

The center and brightest of these three stars is Altair.

The Summer Triangle of Deneb, Altair, and Vega — α Cygni, α Aquilae, and α Lyrae — is easily recognized, as its three stars are all of the 1st magnitude.

Once joined in low Earth orbit, the three would then travel out to the Moon and the Orion / Altair combination would fly a lunar orbit rendezvous flight pattern.

Early in the 23rd century, the United Planets Cruiser C57-D travels to the planet Altair IV, 16 light-years from the Earth, to discover the fate of an expedition sent 20 years earlier.

The " MITS-Mobile " team toured the United States giving seminars featuring the Altair Computer and Altair BASIC.

Pertec was eager to increase sales to small businesses through the 26 Altair Computer stores across the United States.

* USS Altair ( AD-11 ), a ship of the United States Navy

Three ships of the United States Navy have been named Altair, after the first magnitude star in the constellation Aquila, in the northern Milky Way.

Early examples include the Altair 8800 from the United States and the later British Newbear 77-68 and Nascom designs from the late 70's and early 80's.

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.