Albireo

Albireo is an optical double star (a chance alignment of two independent stars at different distances from earth) at the head of the swan in the constellation Cygnus. Many apparent single stars are actual doubles.

At magnitude 3.2, Albireo is visible to the naked eye and looks like a single star.

In October it is finally getting dark shortly after 8 in south-central Utah.

North (toward Polaris) is up in the photo. The picture was taken with a fully modified Canon Rebel camera (this is my one shot color camera) on a TEC 140 telescope in the Alpenglow-Torrey House Observatory in the dark sky community of Torrey, Utah (Bortle 2-3).

The dome has been stuck again. My son, Nick, got it unstuck while he was in Torrey in September.

The 12 best of 14 12-second sub-frames were used and stacked in Deep Sky Stacker = 144 second photo. Unguided, binned 2X2 in the SkyX (to make smaller files for internet transfer), no calibration frames. Processed in Photoshop (CS5).

Location in the night sky of the photo:

Astrometry.net

 

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