“These are the last days of the waning year;
High in the west now stands Deneb,
Great Star of the Cross…”
– Robert Burhnam Jr., Burnham’s Celestial Handbook, vol. 2.
An icy blast of cold and snow landed across the western Canadian prairies this week, but it wasn’t quite cold enough to keep me from having a long last look at the stars of northern summer now fading fast in the western sky. Scanning slowly with a pair of wide-field ‘constellation’ binoculars, I took in the stars of Lyra and Aquila, Delphinus and Sagitta, and the open star cluster IC 4665 near the asterism of Taurus Poniatowski that spells out a contradictory “HI” as it heads below the horizon until spring. But I reserved my final gaze of the evening for one of my favorite patches of sky near the star Deneb at the top of the Northern Cross and the adjacent glow of NGC 7000, the North America Nebula, about 3o to the east. [Read more…] about Going Analog with the North America Nebula
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