vega

Vega, also known by its Bayer designation Alpha Lyrae, is a bright star in the northern constellation Lyra. It is a main-sequence star of spectral type A0V, located at a distance of about 25 light-years from Earth. With an apparent magnitude around 0.03, Vega is one of the most conspicuous stars in the night sky and serves as a primary photometric standard for calibrations in both visible and infrared astronomy. Vega has been extensively studied to understand stellar rotation and circumstellar material. In debris-disk studies, Vega hosts a disk of dust detected by infrared observations, which indicates planetesimal belts and potential planet formation activity. Culturally, Vega has appeared in many traditions: in Chinese astronomy it is known as the Weaving Girl, part of the myth of the lovers separated by the Milky Way.

Vega is also the name of an open-source visualization grammar and a framework for creating, sharing, and exploring interactive visualizations on the web. Developed as part of the data visualization research community, Vega describes charts in a JSON format, including data sources, scales, marks, and interactivity signals. It acts as a mid-level platform that can be rendered by a Vega runtime, and is commonly used as a basis for higher-level tools such as Vega-Lite, which provides a more concise syntax for common chart types. Vega emphasizes declarative specification and interoperability, allowing visualizations to be encoded, stored, and reproduced consistently.