💾 Archived View for gem.librehacker.com › gemlog › starlog › 20230113-0.gmi captured on 2024-02-05 at 09:48:18. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
⬅️ Previous capture (2023-01-29)
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The skies cleared up unexpectedly in the evening, and we didn't have other evening plans, so I headed out to the boat launch after putting the kids to bed. I couldn't stay out very long because I was pretty tired, and it was a work night. I also lost a lot of time due to a problem with my eyepiece fogging up over and over again. After 45 minutes or so I realized that my facemask was somehow dispersing my breath up and over the eyepiece. So in the end I only had time for one drawing. Around 9:15pm I finished this drawing of a group of stars just a little south-west of ε Orion, which is the middle star in Orion's belt.
Here is a similiar screen shot from Stellarium:
Comparing with Stellarium values, it appears that the highest magnitude (i.e., dimmest) star I could see was 9.0. This compares to 6.5 for naked-eye viewing under very good conditions. The sky around Orion seemed dark but I noticed a lot of twinkling in the stars.
The central star HIP 26108 is listed in the Hipparcos catalog as Spectral Type K5III[1], and so interpreted to be an Orange/Red star, Giant class luminosity[2][3].
[1] https://hipparcos-tools.cosmos.esa.int/cgi-bin/HIPcatalogueSearch.pl?hipId=26108, accessed 2023-01-13
[2] https://lweb.cfa.harvard.edu/~pberlind/atlas/htmls/note.html, accessed 2023-01-13
[3] https://astronomy.swin.edu.au/cosmos/H/Harvard+Spectral+Classification, accessed 2023-01-13
