Unfortunately, near the very end, Orpheus faltered and looked back, causing Eurydice to be left in the Underworld forever.

Orpheus spent the rest of his life strumming his lyre while wandering aimlessly through the land, rejecting all marriage offers from women.

According to Eratosthenes, Orpheus failed to make a necessary sacrifice to Dionysus due to his regard for Apollo as the supreme deity instead.

Ovid tells a rather different story, saying that women, in retribution for Orpheus's rejection of marriage offers, ganged up and threw stones and spears.

[5] The Roman book De astronomia, attributed to Hyginus, also records another myth about Lyra, which said that it belonged to Theseus "for he was skilful in all the arts and seems to have learned the lyre as well".

The book reports that the neighbouring constellation now known as Hercules was said to depict many different mythical figures, including Theseus, Orpheus, or the musician Thamyris.

[9][10] Lyra is bordered by Vulpecula to the south, Hercules to the west, Draco to the north, and Cygnus to the east.

[13] German cartographer Johann Bayer used the Greek letters alpha through nu to label the most prominent stars in the constellation.

English astronomer John Flamsteed observed and labelled two stars each as delta, epsilon, zeta and nu.

He added pi and rho, not using xi and omicron as Bayer used these letters to denote Cygnus and Hercules on his map.

[20] Vega was the first star other than the Sun to be photographed,[21] as well as the first to have a clear spectrum recorded, showing absorption lines for the first time.

[30] South of Delta is Sulafat (Gamma Lyrae), a blue giant and the second-brightest star in the constellation.

[32][33][34] In this case, the stars are so close together that the larger giant is overflowing its Roche lobe and transferring material to the secondary, forming a semidetached system.

[35] The plane of the orbit is aligned with Earth and the system thus shows eclipses, dropping nearly a full magnitude from its 3rd-magnitude baseline every 13 days,[36] although its period is increasing by around 19 seconds per year.

[40] Even further north is FL Lyrae, a much fainter 9th-magnitude Algol variable that drops by half a magnitude every 2.18 days during the primary eclipse.

[44] It can be found less than a degree away from the naked-eye star 16 Lyrae, a 5th-magnitude A-type subgiant[45] located around 37 parsecs distant.

[16] The brightest star not included in the asterism and the westernmost cataloged by Bayer or Flamsteed is Kappa Lyrae, a typical red giant[46] around 73 parsecs distant.

[46] Lambda is located just south of Gamma, Theta is positioned in the east, and HD 173780, the brightest star in the constellation with no Bayer or Flamsteed designation, is more southernly.

Just north of Theta and of almost exactly the same magnitude is Eta Lyrae, a blue subgiant with a near-solar metal abundance.

[49] Also nearby is the faint HP Lyrae, a post-asymptotic giant branch (AGB) star that shows variability.

[52] Another evolved star is the naked-eye variable XY Lyrae, a red bright giant[46] just north of Vega that varies between 6th and 7th magnitudes over a period of 120 days.

It is unique in that it is the only known Cepheid in the Milky Way to undergo periodic phase and amplitude changes, analogous to the Blazhko effect in RR Lyrae stars.

[64] Another outbursting star is AY Lyrae, an SU Ursae Majoris-type dwarf nova that has undergone several superoutbursts.

The central star, V477 Lyrae, is an eclipsing post-common-envelope binary, consisting of a white dwarf primary and an oversized secondary component due to recent accretion.

The nebula itself is of relatively low surface brightness compared to the central star,[73] and is undersized for the primary's mass for reasons not yet fully understood.

Several million years ago, it collided with a smaller galaxy, which created a region filled with young, hot, blue stars.

The afterglow re-brightened at 33 minutes after the original burst, only the third found to exhibit such an effect in the timeframe,[76] and unable to be completely explained by known phenomena.

[84] Just short of naked-eye visibility is HD 178911, a triple system consisting of a close binary and a visually separable sunlike star.

The sunlike star has a planet with over 6 Jupiter masses discovered in 2001, the second found in a triple system after that of 16 Cygni.