They call it the Flying Star

61 Cygni is a double star in the constellation Cygnus the Swan. It’s not a standout star in brightness … so what’s so special about it?

61 Cygni is particularly cool because it has one of the highest proper motions of any visible star. That’s its movement across the dome of our sky.

So if you took photos of 61 Cygni over the course of several years, you’d see it shift position in the sky with respect to the more distant stars around it.

This unusual motion across our sky has earned 61 Cygni the nickname the Flying Star.

Two images showing the apparent motion of the double star 61 Cygni over nearly ten years. pic.twitter.com/h1K46FOWVF

— Dave Eagle ? Keep Looking Up. (@Dave_StarGeezer) April 19, 2025

61 Cygni has a high proper motion

So why does this star have such a high proper motion? Imagine two people running across your field of view, one closer to you and the other farther away. In relation to the more distant landscape, the person closer to you would appear to cover more ground – more objects would pass behind them – than the person farther away.

In a similar way, very distant stars appear “fixed” in relationship to each other. However, they’re actually moving through space in their various journeys around the center of our Milky Way galaxy. But most are so far away that we can’t easily detect their proper motions. On the other hand, 61 Cygni is different. It moves relatively rapidly in front of the fixed stars because it is relatively near Earth.

While not the closest star to the sun (that honor goes to the Alpha Centauri system), 61 Cygni is just 11.4 light-years distant. That makes it the 4th-closest star that’s visible to the unaided eye, after Alpha Centauri, Sirius and Epsilon Eridani.

Science of 61 Cygni

61 Cygni isn’t just one star. It’s a binary system, with two stars that take about 659 years to orbit one another. To the unaided eye and through most binoculars, it appears as one star. However, if you look at it through a modestly-sized telescope, you’ll see it resolved as two stars. They have apparent magnitudes of 5.21 and 6.03.

The 61 Cygni binary system is the 15th-nearest known star system to us. Both are K-type dwarf stars in the main sequence, thought to have formed 6 billion years ago (the sun, in comparison, is 4.6 billion years old).

The more massive star of the pair has 70% of our sun’s mass and puts out 15% of our sun’s total electromagnetic energy. Its companion has 63% of our sun’s mass and shines at just 8.5% of our sun’s luminosity. Both are a bit over half the size of our sun. They’re also variable stars, exhibiting small changes in brightness over time.

The history of 61 Cygni

61 Cygni has no role in classical mythology. Of course, since it’s barely visible to the eye, it’s not surprising that the ancients apparently left no written reference to it at all. But its role in the history of astronomy is assured.

The motion of 61 Cygni across our sky, while large compared to other stars, can’t be easily detected with the eye alone over the span of a human lifetime. It was with the arrival of telescopes and through meticulous observations that astronomers discovered high proper motions of stars.

Astronomer Giuseppe Piazzi, in 1792, first noticed that 61 Cygni had a high proper motion when he compared his observations to those taken by another astronomer 40 years earlier. By 1804, he had gathered enough information to be the first to publish about this extraordinary star that he nicknamed the Flying Star.

Piazzi correctly noted that this high proper motion indicated that 61 Cygni was a nearby star, and that parallax measurements could be used to figure out its distance. German astronomer F.W. Bessel was the first to get reliable measurements of the 61 Cygni stars’ parallaxes that gave a distance of 10.4 light-years, which is pretty close to the distance we know today, 11.4 light-years. It’s also the first time a star’s distance was reliably measured.

How to see it

61 Cygni is roughly halfway between two other stars that you can probably identify. First is Deneb, the brightest star in the constellation Cygnus the Swan. And the other star is Zeta Cygni, at one end of the Swan’s wing. You’ll find 61 Cygni between these two. Several other similarly dim stars are located nearby, so you’ll need a detailed finder star chart to properly identify 61 Cygni. Take a look at our chart at the top of this post.

61 Cygni’s position is RA: 21h 06m 55s, Dec: +38° 44′ 57″

Proper motion: 4″ in Right Ascension, 3″ in Declination

Parallax: 0.286″

Bottom line: 61 Cygni, while faint to the unaided eye, is one of the closest stars to Earth. It exhibits a high proper motion – or motion across the sky – compared to other stars.