The Best First Telescope?
I was looking around the American Astronomical League and came across the fact that they have a number of observing lists, not just the 100 Double Star List that I have been used to. I was intrigued and printed out the Carbon Star list for use when the skies cleared, and I have found it fascinating.
https://www.astroleague.org/files/obsclubs/CarbonStar/CarbonStarList3.pdf
All the stars seem to be variables, which is to be expected, and once the coordinates have been found the stars are surprisingly easy to identify because of their colour, which ranges from red‐orange to scarlet. None of them are very bright but all those in the AAL list are above magnitude 11 for at least some of the time.
Below are Photoshop sketches of two stars. WZ Cass is well known but most of them are quite obscure. Both of them have a reasonably interesting star field in the background (click to make the images bigger).
WZ Cass
TT Cygni
The observations were done on October 26th 2015 using my CPC 800. Seeing was good but there was a very bright Moon which made the “dark” sky a light grey. All observations were done with a magnification of 100x, sketched in pencil and transferred to Photoshop. WZ Cass is magnitude 6.9 – 11.0, TT Cygni is magnitude 7.0 – 9.1.
I recommend others to look at the AAL website; it contains enough lists for most people to get some ideas, from binoculars to deep sky.
https://www.astroleague.org/al/obsclubs/AlphabeticObservingClubs.html
Phillip.
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