This September 4, 2017 the sky was clear for the first time in awhile. The smoke from the tragic fires throughout the western part of our nation have hindered late Summer observing. There was one item left for required observations for the Explore the Universe certificate. It was quite a basic finish to a year long project. I required one more double star observation and Beta Cygni was sitting right overhead.
Beta Cygni is most commonly known as Albireo and represents the head of the swan constellation. It is a beautiful sight through any telescope that can split the pair. One of the stars is a bright amber colour and the other has a blue hue to it. The image below is one I took last October.
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| Beta Cygni - Albireo |
To find the pair manually I merely turned my telescope on the naked eye object in the sky and lined it up with my red dot finder. Using a magnification of 171x with my 7mm eyepiece the pair was easily split. I estimated the distance between them was 2% across my field of view corresponding to a 49" separation. The actual accepted value is 35" giving a percent error of 40%. This was the first time I measured something sub-arcminute. The next time I measure such a small separation, under clearer skies, I will use higher magnification with a barlow lens to see if I can get closer to the accepted value.
Albireo is helpful for finding the globular cluster M56. Tracing a line between the naked eye Albireo and Gamma Lyrae one will find this beautiful globular. If you are playing with binoculars you can actually fit Albireo and M56 in the same field of view.
This is the final object required to be found for the Explore the Universe certificate. Typically you had to find half the objects in each category. However, I will continue to find the other half of them throughout the years to come!
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