Andrew Cooper
Nov 29, 2021    Waikoloa, HI (map)
20cm f/6 Newtonian, Cave Astrola @ 76x
Seeing: 7 Transparency: 6 Moon: 0%

Brilliant white, no companion noted, rich galactic starfield

Captain William Henry Smyth
Aug 25, 1836    No. 6 The Crescent, Bedford, England (map)
150mm f/17.6 refractor by Tully 1827

A bright star, whose acolyte is so small that it is here rather estimated than measured. A 2½, whitish; B 11½, dusky.

This object is called Caph, from Kajf-al-Khadib, the stained hand, a name from which a scientific friend supposes, that although now only the lucida cathedrae— or bright star on the couch-frame—one of the hands may have reached it in the earlier designs. But the Arabians applied the term Kaff, a flat hand, to the whole asterism, whose five brightest stars represented the thumb and fingers, coloured as if stained with henna, after the Oriental custom. This general name came to be fixed upon β.

Mohammed al Tízíní records it as Sanám al-nákah, the camel's hump—for ardent fancies figured a kneeling camel of the principal stars. Ptolemy describes it as being on the female's back. Caph is considered to be variable, from the second to the fourth magnitudes; but to me it has generally appeared of the brightness above recorded.

A glance from the Pole star to Alpherat, passes through Caph, nearly in mid-distance: or a line from between γ and δ, the following stars in the wain of the Great Bear, carried over the pole, strikes upon it, at a similar distance beyond Polaris:

In yonder stars, which form a Cross,
A Cross more glorious than that
lo, Caph precedes the whole,
which decks the austral pole.

― A Cycle of Celestial Objects Vol II, The Bedford Catalogue, William Henry Smyth, 1844

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