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hello
after a night of observing faint planetaries
i slewed to 31 cygnus and almost fell out of my chair due to the brightness and color (8" SCT 24 pan). the primary was burnt orange, the secondary (30 cyg) looked white to me and the close 3rd star was pale blue.

decided to snap a few pics with careful color balance and the secondary showed a faint blue halo as well, which makes sense given it's spectral class, A5.

somewhere i read a description of someone coining this as the patriotic triple, but i can't recall where i saw it. does anyone have any more info on this?

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Actually, the triple is Omicron-1 Cygni, which I once called "the Patriotic Star", in one of my observing reports, so perhaps you read one of those. It is a pretty triple star (30 Cyg, 31, Cyg, and HD 192579) with wide separation, but the alignment is probably optical only, as the three stars are quite distant from us and from each other. The star field is also fairly rich, so it makes a good target. Clear skies to you.

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David W. Knisely
Hyde Memorial Observatory
http://www.hydeobservatory.info
Prairie Astronomy Club
http://www.prairieastronomyclub.org

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