This is Albireo, a candidate binary star system 430 light years away in the constellation Cygnus. This blue and yellow-orange beauty has been one of my very favourite doubles to observe ever since it blew my mind the first time I saw what looked like a single star in the sky, was actually a double star! If it turns out to actually be a binary system orbiting around a barycentre, then it is believed that it would take 100,000 years to complete one orbital period!

This capture is only a 10 minute live-stack that was acquired whilst testing some awesome new features in the unreleased version of SharpCap 3.1 using an unfiltered Altair Astro Astronomy Hypercam 178C. The stack consists of 600 x 1 second exposures with 32% gain (many thanks to Jay Bolt for providing some very useful sensor data on this 👍) and 12% offset and then just lightly processed in Pixinsight.

Oh, and yes, this is my first light for a 6" f/8 SW Newtonian. I thought long and hard and then figured that a photographically slow reflecting telescope (originally intended for planetary observations with a nice small secondary for high contrast) would exhibit little coma, and that when coupled with a small enough sensor like the one in the Hypercam 178, that it would never really see any coma! What this meant was that one could image without any coma correcting lenses refracting the optical path, leaving a pure reflecting system that can bring all the starlight to the same focal point! I even removed the protective glass from in front of the camera sensor to achieve a "pure mirror" response, so that the telescope could really bring all of the starlight to a single focal point on the sensor for a truly full spectrum one-shot colour image (300nm-1000nm sensor range). A side effect of this is a slightly larger FWHM in the star size, but I'm feeling that this is a good start to my little experiment!

More data to share with you again soon, but until then and I hope you like my quick take on Albireo 😊👍

P.S. these are my first diffraction spikes, woohoo!