Almach - An Amazing Alignment Star

Every time I set up my telescope I need to go through an alignment procedure so that the SynScan GOTO handset knows where it located and where it is pointing. Most of the time I just pick a couple of stars I know and quickly fly through the alignment procedure so I can get onto looking at the things I really want to. However, recently I used a star called Almach to align and I was pleasantly surprised to notice it was a double star when I centred it in my field of view.

This in itself isn't that special, but what was amazing was how fantastic the double actually looked due to the yellow primary and blue secondary stars. Anyway, as it looked so pretty I decided that this time I would not just move onto my observing plan and would instead take a closer look at Almach.

Gamma Andromedae / Almach / Struve 205 (HIP 9640/ SAO 37734)
RA : 02 03 53.92   Dec : +42 19 47.5
Magnitudes: 2.3, 5.0
Separation: 9.8”
Position Angle: 64°

So as I had aligned the scope with a 25mm Eyepiece I swapped to the 8mm BST Eyepiece so that I could really see the separation of the two components. What had looked like a nice star in the 25mm because stunning in the 8mm, I had some really clear separation and the colours were striking. This was a double I knew I had to sketch and notated the colours in the margins.. if you are interested the yellow was recorded as "bathroom yellow" because it reminded me of the paint on our bathroom walls.

I am still not sure I am doing it justice with my artistic skills but if you compare that with some of the other sketches I have done for double stars I think it is quite clearly stunning in comparison. To be honest, I am curious to know how stars like this would appear with a proper astrophotography set up.