Stargazing 2025-02-08: Hydra (publ. 2025-02-10)

Yesterday evening (2025-02-08) the temperature dropped some — I think it was around -15 ℉ — and the skies appeared strikingly clear and crisp. It was getting too late to keep the boys up any longer, but as soon as I had them tucked in, I suited up in my best winter gear and headed out, around 9:15pm AKST.

In the darkest part of the sky, I had a nice view of Taurus. The Hyades looked beautiful and rich in my binoculars, but I felt the urge to explore something new that night, and decided to sketch something else.

To the SE, the sky was much brighter — Fairbanks lays mostly to the east — and the stars more difficult to see, but there was also a lot of the celestial sphere that I was not familiar with, east of Orion. Exploring with my 12x60 binocs, I found an interesting pattern of stars in an oval of the sky around six or seven degrees wide. With my naked eyes, I could only just barely see two of the stars. I did a sketch of this area with the 12x60 binocs. At the time I had no idea what I was sketching, but later I identified it as the head of Hydra. Here is the sketch:

sketch centered on ρ Hyd

I observed a reddish tint in two of these stars, which I later identified as ζ and ε. Per my field guide, these are K (orange) and G (yellow-white) type stars, respectively.

I briefly considered observing the moon as well, but it was at a very high angle. I didn't think it would be comfortable to view it using my 60-AZ reflector, which is my go-to tool for lunar observation.

I don't think that I'm going to get around this winter to fixing the mount for the 90mm reflector I found at Value Village. My home life is too busy right now. There isn't too much more stargazing season left in the year, so I don't think it is worth making it a priority. Maybe it can be a summer or fall project.

My season for sunrise photography is approaching. But I am having more trouble with the Nikon camera I was relying on — it seems like the charging circuit is not working. Hopefully I'm able to work out some other solution for a hand-held camera within the next month or so. I haven't seen any replacement options lately at Value Village. Money is really tight at the moment, but maybe I can get something on Ebay when the tax refund comes in.

Copyright

CC BY-SA 4.0 Deed