Locale: My back yard.
Conditions: Average transparency, fair seeing,
Equipment: Celestron 80 frac
Time: 10:19 pm to 1:00 am
The day was beautiful – cool and clear. Anticipating some good astro, I released the C80 from its lair and some of my favourite EPs for a quick look around.
Mr. Baar mentioned a certain iconic star (Izar) as a subject of a recent visual observation, and for me this is Mizar A and B, along with Alcor. Whatever is your home position in your brain, quot capita, tot sententiae.
It seems a relatively easy split: Mizar B and Mizar A (actually pairs of stars) but the actual gap between them is in the order of magnitude of something akin to 8 times that of our solar system (30 billion miles). As interstellar distance goes, this might be described as next-door country.
I found out that Mizar and Alcor are 80 lya and share a common proper motion across the sky, and recent data have revealed that Alcor also possesses a dim red dwarf companion, and further, that Alcor is gravitationally bound to Mizar, despite the huge distance between them. Surprisingly Mizar A and B are also doubles – so the system is six stars. No way for me to split them with my little scope, but this knowledge is kind of fun to keep in mind.
Moving my little scope to the deck I could see Jupiter rising, just to the west, Scorpius.
M4 near Antares – Scorpius cossets his riches of globular clusters in the
Jupiter – Lovely and fat in the
Thanks for reading to the bottom,
Ian