Tonight, the girls and I watched Stargazers #16-39 which describes how to find Cygnus the swan.  I had no trouble locating it after figuring out the three stars in the summer triangle: Vega, Deneb, and Altair.  Vega was almost directly over head at 8:30pm local which was a big help. Deneb, it turns out, is the back of the swan and the eye of the swan is a double-star called Albireo.  My daughters had a bit more trouble finding Cygnus, but we’ll keep working on it.

My wife arrived home and the girls were anxious to show her what they’ve learned over the past few weeks.  They showed her how to use the “Big Dipper’s” pointer stars to find Polaris (North Star), how to hop from Polaris to Cassiopeia and finally hop from Cassiopeia to the great square (part of Pegasus).  This star hopping pattern was described in Stargazers #16-38.

Then we pulled out my old telescope (a Meade 4500, a 113mm/4.5" reflector on an equatorial mount I bought about 20 years ago).  I found this video today which describes how to align a German equatorial mount very helpful. He describes locking the right ascension and declination controls in a particular position and then using the altitude (latitude) and azimuth (horizontal turning) adjustments to center Polaris, first in the finder scope and then in the telescope itself.  After you lock the altitude and azimuth controls and unlock the right ascension and declination controls, you’re ready to roll!

Using just the 20mm eyepiece, I located Albireo and showed everyone how to “split” a double.  The two stars of Albireo are of strikingly different color, so it makes for a good target.  We also turned the telescope on NGC457, an open cluster in Cassiopeia.  I believe the mirror in the 4500 might be too far gone for deep sky observing as we could not make out much of it.  Maybe tomorrow we’ll put the Meade DS2114 (a newer 4.5" reflector) in the equatorial mount and see what we can see.

The girls also spotted 8 satellites, 7 airplanes, and the Milky Way.  Early on things were a bit cloudy, but by the time we were actually observing the skies cleared and seeing was wonderful.