Stargazing: Fairbanks, AK, USA: 2024-09-28 (publ. 2024-09-29)
Location: Fairbanks, AK, USA (my yard)
Date/Time: 2024-09-29, ending around 10:20pm AKST
We've had very clear skies starting Friday 2024-09-27, and continuing into today (the 29th). Yesterday evening I was able to some stargazing out in the yard. Some of the boys came out with me for a while and asked me questions about various stars and constellations. I was able to use it as an opportunity to remind them about how the stars are God's army (host) in a sense, and that they remind us about how powerful he is. We also talked about how Jesus shines brighter than all the stars.
After they went back to bed, I did this sketch of Perseus. It was initially done in sloppy, light pencil marks, but I traced over that with a black pen and neatened it up a bit.
I had been thinking recently that it is not really satisfactory to simple stare at the stars, since it is very difficult afterwards to remember where the stars are as far as their relative position. It occurred to me that if I did a simple sketch, and then jotted down the angular distance between each of the stars, it would make it much easier to compare what I saw with my star atlas.
As far as measuring the angles: initially I tried using my sextant, but I found that it was very difficult to get the correct two stars both into the small viewing area, especially when dealing with a bunch of dim stars that look very similiar to the naked eye. So, I fell back to the finger and hand method:
A Handy Guide to Measuring the Sky
In my sketch, I included a degree measurement between each star and the one it was nearest. The brightest stars, that is, the ones which could be seen with no effort, were given a larger dot, and all the rest were given a small dot.
This approach was satisfying, and afterwards it was easy to identify stars using just the Cambridge atlas, without have to reproduce the view in Stellarium. I marked the identifications on the sketch in red. It would be nice to better respresent the varied brightness of the stars, though preferably without adding a lot of time and complexity to the sketch process. Maybe different dots for "brightly visible", "dim but steady", and "difficult to see".
Copyright
This work © 2024 by Christopher Howard is licensed under Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International.
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