Interview by Clayton Jeter

It seems our society is getting more and more exciting each year. Through the years we are gaining more new members with fantastic ideas…great ideas to improve our club. It’s a wonderful time to be a member in our society. A perfect example is our very own Rene Gedaly. This girl is a godsend for our society with all of her energy, time, devotion to the society, and forward thinking. She’s a special person.

Towards the end of last year, I mentioned to Rene an idea that I had of providing our club with its own observing program for use at our observing site near Columbus. She took the ball and ran with it. She did all the work…including creating the list, presenting it to our board for approval, ordering pins and certificates, and then announcing it to our society. She’s a work horse!

Ok… if you don’t know her yet, you will now. Here’s Rene…

Object: Plaskett’s Star
Class: Blue Star
Constellation: Monoceros
Magnitude: 6.1
R.A.: 06 h 37 m 24 s
Dec: 06 deg 08 min 07 sec
Size/Spectral: (O Class)
Distance: 6600 ly (uncertain)
Optics needed: Small telescope

Why this is interesting:

I observed this star on January 19 of this year, and it’s a real beauty. It’s the brightest star in a field of stars and shines like a steely-blue diamond in the sky. I found this star in a catalog while looking for an O class star for my ‘Observing Stellar Evolution’ Astronomical League program.

Most of us are aware of the colors of stars, the most obvious example of the difference in colors being Albireo. This orange/white star pair starkly shows the differences that exist in star colors. Color and temperature are the same thing. The hotter the star, the bluer the star, the cooler the star, the redder. It turns out that finding stars of all (OBAFGKM) colors is something of a challenge because the colors of stars are not equally distributed among the stars in the sky.

You remember that star colors are designated by a letter O being the hottest (whitest) stars and M being the coolest (reddest) stars.