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Old 09-04-2021, 06:54 AM
N1 (Mirko)
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Sirius B?

A nice outing last night on the Bortle 1-2 boundary with the 8" f/6 made for excellent maximum-exit pupil galaxy sweeping with the ES62°40. However the highlight of the night was what appears to be a good solid view of the Pup at 200x with a 6mm Fuji Abbe. I knew I had the optic dialled as confirmed by a star test and the position angle of the dim companion seemed correct, but I still thought (having split Antares with this instrument with considerably more effort), surely it can't be this easy. I mean the star was extremely faint compared to Sirius but was there all of the time. No intermittent in-and-out business. A quick look at Rigel confirmed though that the separation was similar to that of Rigel A and B if not slightly greater. So this might just have been my first visual of a white dwarf...

Edit: I note that if this object had been aligned with one of the diffraction spikes, there's almost no way I would have seen it. It was considerably fainter than the spikes at that distance from Sirius A.

Last edited by N1; 09-04-2021 at 07:06 AM.
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Old 09-04-2021, 07:38 AM
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GUS.K (Ivan)
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Great report Mirko, enjoyable read. Last time I spotted it was with a 7 inch Mak, clean spot without diffraction spikes. I usually have a look with the 18 inch when it's up as well. Thanks for sharing.
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Old 09-04-2021, 07:56 AM
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Tinderboxsky (Steve)
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Yes, put that down as a confirmed sighting of the Pup and your first white dwarf! Thanks for sharing.
Interesting comment re your comparison with your previous Antares split. We’ll get another Antares opportunity soon to have another look. I think all of my Antares splits have been slightly easier than Sirius.
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Old 09-04-2021, 08:39 AM
N1 (Mirko)
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Thanks for your comments guys.

Steve, that might be due to different seeing conditions too. For some reason I wasn't even thinking about Sirius on those Antares nights (it would have been pretty low by that stage), but I did have a look at rising Antares just before packing up last night (it was still lower than Sirius then, and out over the Ocean), and ....nope.
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