Stargazing 2025-01-31: Cygnus (publ. 2025-02-01)

On Friday morning, I was able to get out for a few minutes of stargazing before work, starting around 4:15am AKST. The stars seemed very dim, but I could see Leo off to the south. I veered away from Leo, though, as I didn't have much time, and it seemed like in the past it was difficult to find much of interest around Leo, at least in bright sky conditions like this.

I saw a few brighter stars toward the SE and decided to focus in that area. I was looking at the constellations Cygnus and Lyra, but I couldn't recognize them at the time, because they were on the opposite side of the sky than where I am used to seeing them, and also they were partially covered by houses and trees.

I focused initially on the brighter star (Lyra) but had to change plans when a boiler started up and exhaust blocked the view. So I angled over to the left a bit, toward a slightly dimmer star (Deneb). About 5 degrees above (NE) of Deneb I found an interesting little group of stars. Here is the sketch:

sketch of FoV around ω₁ Cyg

This is not an official cluster according to my sources, but in Wagman's book "Lost Stars" he notes,

Bayer described Omega as nebulous. Although there are no nebulous objects near 45 or 46, the area is one of the richest in the Milky Way with many closely packed stars surrounding 45 and 56.

Stars 45 and 46 here are referring to ω₁ and ω₂. Historically there was some fluctuation in the naming of ω₁, ω₂, and 43, and for a while designations were swapped, and one of them was ω₃. See Wagman pg. 130.

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