Location: home,
Equipment: Stellarvue 102mm ED refractor on
Last weekend clouds have been playing peekaboo with me. Clear Outside forecast has been changing every few minutes. Finally, it has settled on three hours of clear sky on Sunday evening. I didn’t trust it enough to bother with big guns and decided to go with grab-and-go session.
It has been a while since I have used AZGti mount. My phone has died in between, and the new phone had issues connecting to the mount. It was a weird issue. Superficially, SynScan
). Finally, I decided that it was enough fun and pulled my really old phone (which I keep handy just for such occasions). It has connected to the mount without a glitch.Once the mount has completed alignment I looked up for targets and discovered that low clouds were creeping in from all directions. Cancer was in the area equally distant from clouded portions and I proceeded with catching a few doubles there.
CANCER DOUBLES
Psi 1 Cnc (BUP 111) – 6.6, 9.3, 8.8, ab80.9”, ac188.4” – despite been a wide triple it was presented nicely at 39x. Fainter silvery B and C components provided a nice contrast to bright rich copper-colored primary.
WRH 27 AB – 7.6, 10.7, 29.1” – nice contrast pair of bright orange main and faint silvery sidekick (65x).
STF 1191 – 10.3, 10.8, 3.5” – this faint close pair of grayish stars was at the limit of SV102ED resolving power. At 143x the dim blob of light clearly had elongated shape. Switching between 4mm (179x) and 3mm (238x) EPs I have managed at the moments of better seeing briefly resolve two faint stars apart with some space in between.
STT 564 – 6.9, 11.0, 10.8, ab106.6”, ac289.3” – another wide triple, nicely presented at lower power. Richly colored golden primary with faint silvery B and C components.
Zeta 1 Cnc (STF 1196) – 5.3, 6.2, 5.8, ab1.2”, ac5.8” – real
Zeta 1,2 Cnc system also harbors a few fainter components. I wanted to spend some time observing them but by now the sky was completely overrun by clouds.
