Stargazing: Auriga (publ. 2024-09-30)

Location: Fairbanks, AK, USA: front yard

Date: 2024-09-30

Time: 4am AKST

Clear skies again this morning. I was able to make it out around 3:30am for about 40 minutes, and I completed this sketch. The original was done in sloppy pencil work but I drew over that with pen to make it neater.

stargazing sketch targeting Auriga

The numbers represent my estimated angles using the hand method. There are three dot sizes:

- the largest is for bright stars

- the medium dot is for dim stars that are steadily visible

- the small dot is for dim stars that were difficult to observe, but I am confident in the observation

I saw a number of other flickers of light which I think were also stars, but I couldn't manage to get a view of them reliably and repeatably in the same locations.

My angle measurements, even though they are very rough, are very helpful in proper identification of the stars, which I can do mostly with just the Cambridge star charts, and not having to refer to Stellarium. I did use Stellarium to confirm the location of Mars, which in turn helped me to properly identify ε Gem and μ Gem.

Stellarium is of course a great free software program. But I feel like something is lost if, for identification, I have to reproduce my view in Stellarium, rather than just relying on my notes and my star charts. I think I learn more this way. Stellarium is of course a great free software astronomy program, but it can feel like a bit of crutch, if I trust it too much, rather than carefully studying my own observational data.

Copyright

CC BY-SA 4.0 Deed