Albireo - Beta2 in Cygnus

I captured this image of Albireo, one of the main, visible stars in the constellation of Cygnus. Actually, make that two as it is a double star. They stand out brightly against the glittering backdrop of the Cygnus Star Cloud.

 

Albireo A is the larger, amber star and Albireo B is the smaller sapphire blue star. If they are orbiting each other the orbital period is at least 75,000 years.

 

It turns out that Albireo A is itself a binary star with the components orbiting every 100 years. This whole system is a mere 380 light years away. You could almost touch it - if you had long arms.

 

The amber star is about 50 times the size of our sun and shines 950 times as bright. The little blue star is only 3 times the mass of our sun and only shines 190 times as bright.

 

This is a combination of 62 ten-second exposures using my C11. Any longer and the bright stars would have been way over exposed, any less and the background stars would not have shown up.

 

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Telescope: Celestron C11-A XLT Schmidt Cassegrain OTA

Mount: SkyWatcher EQ6-R Pro

 

Controller: ZWO ASIAIR Plus 256G

Main Camera: ZWO ASI533MC Pro at -10C

Filter: ZWO UV/IR Cut filter

Focuser: ZWO EAF

Guide Camera: ZWO ASI174MM Mini guidecam

Guide via: ZWO OAG

 

Stacked from:

Lights 62 at 10 seconds, gain 101, temp -10C

Darks 30 at 10 seconds, gain 101, temp -10C

Flat 30 at 570 ms, gain 101, temp -10C

Dark Flat 30 at 570 ms gain 101 temp -10C

 

Bortle 4 sky.

Integrated the saved frames in Astro Pixel Processor.

Processed in PixInsight

Added captions in Photoshop CS4

Done