Another look at Chi Cygni

Sunday 6th: From my garden, the sky is very dark and clear. The Moon is well over to the east and there is a slight breeze but much milder than last week. It's early evening and plenty of stars can be seen; Cygnus is the target and it's essential to view Chi before it gets too low. Using 10x50 binoculars bring many more fainter stars into view and sweeping through the star-fields of the Milky Way up the length of Cygnus is amazing! Chi appears to be much brighter than when last viewd on the 30th November. To me it is brighter than the +5.9 comparisson star but still much dimmer than (about 60%) the bright +5.1 mag star to the west. So I have confidence in making my visual magnitude estimate of Chi as +5.7. It now looks orange in colour through the binoculars.

Set my 8" SCT up with a view to spending a few hours in the garden looking at Doubles. Unfortunately the azimuth drive is overshooting targets wildly. I seem to have little control as the backlash has got worse to the point where it is not efficient to use the scope. So after a couple of hours of fighting the drives, I packed it up. Trawled the internet for answers and need to retrain both drives before I use it again.

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