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⬅️ Previous capture (2023-01-29)
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The skies looked mostly clear when I woke up this morning at about 2:30am AKDT, and the forecast wasn't looking great, so I decided to do some star gazing in the yard. I wanted to save time for devotions and prayer this morning, so I decided to take only my binoculars and to stay out there for about an hour. This time, I drew some nicer circles in my notebook by tracing around a cup. I'm finding that it works nicely to take a lawn chair out into the yard, set the fold out table on my right side with the notebook, and draw the FOV with my right hand while holding the binoculars in my left hand. Here is a scan of the notebook pages, one scan without annotations, and the other with them:
Notebook 2022 October 5 Morning
For my first drawing, I picked a set of stars roughly in between the bow of Orion and the head of Taurus. I centered on three little stars that were arranged in a wide "V" shape. I believe these are the same stars as seen in these Stellarium screenshots:
Wide view showing Orion and Taurus
Zoomed in on area with small V-shaped star triplet
Stellaris binocular view of area around V-shaped star triplet
I wasn't quite sure if this was the same, though, as my drawing has several additional stars in it not shown in the screenshot, and one or two other details didn't quite line up the same. But perhaps this is just an area of the sky that has not been of much interest to astronomers.
I also did my first drawing of Pleiades. Pleiades was beautiful as usual, though I can't recall seeing any nebular glow. I'm sure I didn't notice anything that nobody else hasn't seen before, but it was educational to annotate with the star letters and numbers. I'm curious about the little V-shaped set of stars about half-way down from the center of my drawing, which has five stars pointing to the right, led by MCD 2. It would be nice also to get a better look at the nebulae, if I can get the 127mm telescope working at some point.
As I side note, I did see some aurora activity while I was out there, from around 3am to 3:45am. It was not especially colorful, but there were three wide bands of green color stretching from the eastern horizon, across Polaris to the north, and then back down to the western horizon.
