| William Schart | ||||
| Star:
Stn 15 in Canis Majoris
Date & Time: 21, January, 2002 From 10:00 pm CST. Seeing: ~ 6 <1-10 Seeing Scale (10 best)> Location of site: Killeen, TX, USA. Site classification: Suburban Sky darkness: <Limiting magnitude> Temperature: ~ 50ºF Telescope: Celestar 8" SCT Magnification: 80x, 120x and 200x
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Quite a challenge for a
variety of reasons: tight, dim and right smack dab in the
middle of M41!. I popped in the mid power and scanned around a bit,
looking at the dimmest stars I could find and much to my surprise actually
found this.
There are severak chains of stars radiating out from a central core of the cluster, and this pair is located just south and west of this core. Although dim, it still was readily seen and easily split - in fact, once I knew where it was, I went back to low power and could still find and split it. |
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| Stuart Clough | ||||
| Star:
Stn 15 in Canis Majoris
Date & Time: 24.01.02 2200 - 22:55 UT Seeing: 6+ <1-10 Seeing Scale (10 best)> Location of site: Huddersfield A.S. Observatory Lat 53° 37' 20". Long 01° 50' 25"W. Site classification: Moorland. Sky light polluted to East & North. Sky darkness: 4.2 (U Mi) <Limiting magnitude> Temperature: -2º C Conditions: Cloudless sky. Wind - 2 to 5 kts NNW. Telescope: Orion Optics UK GX250 10" f4.8 Mount: Vixen GP Eyepieces: 20 mm Plossl, 9mm Ortho. Celestron Ultima x2 Barlow Magnification: x60, x133, x267 |
Once M41 was in the eyepiece
at x60, this double was surprisingly easy to identify courtesy of Skymap
Pro. SMP shows it at the NE corner of a trapezium of stars which has another
in the longer (southern) side. This asterism shows up well in the eyepiece
STN15 is also its dimmest corner; this even amongst the briliance of the
open cluster field.
Splitting it proved rather harder. I needed x267 to be sure and yet the split could afterwards be seen at x133. Colour was fairly difficult to determine as well. I made both stars white with just a hint of yellow.
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