Red Dwarf: Barnard's Star

John · May 30, 2020

After a very nice session of lunar observing, described here:

https://stargazerslounge.com/topic/355693-cracking-seeing-tonight/

I spent some time with my 12 inch dobsonian observing some of the brighter globular clusters and planetary nebulae. Nothing too challenging but nice, relaxing observing.

Messier 13 in particular, was very spectacular with my 6mm Ethos eyepiece - the full sprawling extent of the cluster took up about 1/3rd of the field of view at 265x, The dark feature known as "the propeller" was very evident. Very similar to this drawing by Michael Vlasov:

By the time I was thinking of packing up, Ophiuchus was in full view. Looking at the Sky & Telescope Pocket Sky Atlas reminded me that Barnard's Star, our closest stellar neighbour visible from the northern hemisphere, was well placed, so I decided to have a look at it.

I've not observed Barnard's Star for some time. It is reasonably faint at magnitude 9.5 so a little care is needed to make sure that the correct star is being observed. With my 12 inch dob it was not hard to see tonight and it does have an orange (to my eye) tint to it.

An up-to-date star chart is needed because, due to it's relatively close proximity, Barnard's Star has a large proper motion - just over 10 arc seconds per year.

I found this "Astronomy Now" piece by Ade Ashford very helpful in addition to my Pocket Sky Atlas:

https://astronomynow.com/2018/08/17/find-barnards-star-the-suns-closest-stellar-neighbour-visible-from-the-uk/

This is the 4th closest star to our solar system and the closest red dwarf apparently. It is only 1.9x larger than Jupiter and a lot smaller than our Sun:

I took the liberty of waving, just in case anyone was observing us from there. Barnard's Star does have at least one known exo-planet which is thought to be about 2x-3x as massive as Earth :smiley:

Not a particularly hard challenge with a 12 inch scope but a nice way to round off a warm nights observing :icon_biggrin: