Double Star Program Thread

[stephen-jones]

Just finished my Double Star list last night. Definitely took your suggestions into account for my logging Ed. Let's see what happens.

[rene-gedaly]

I'm on a posting jag. I predict the Double Star Club will be my last completed for master observer. Unless it's Lunar.

[rene-gedaly]

Thinking ahead to this accursed program, I came upon something truly delightful. It's about PA, position angle, and one's orientation to the sky; first naked eye and then through the telescope eyepiece. I've never read it expressed so commonsense-like:

Two Rules
1. Whatever direction the stars appear to move, that is west.
2. The direction from a star to Polaris is north.

"Well, duh, Rene," you may be thinking. But wait, think of explaining to a rank but eager novice how to map the sky from our everyday cardinal directions of north, south, east, and west onto the celestial globe as seen not only naked eye by looking up but also to "what the telescope does to these" directions. The credit is to Greg Stone on his website Star Splitters. Here's the article: https://bestdoubles.wordpress.com/tag/position-angle/. Enjoy!

[owiens]

I'm about half done with the double star list and have been incorporating some of the lessons learned as I go. It's time to build a spreadsheet with the pairs in order of the program.

1) Might someone have a spreadsheet that was successfully submitted I could get for example? Just a few pairs would be great to see how you incorporated the drawing of the pairs in the spreadsheet. Did you scan drawings in and import into XLS, eid you redraw on final version of XLS, other?

2) Also Ed mentioned having enough power and aligned scope to split the AB pair. Some of the pairs are not AB, if I've looked at Skytools 4 correctly:

Object Pair

Delta Orionis A C
Sigma Orionis A D E
12 Lyncis A C
Zeta Cancri A C
Zeta Ursa Majoris A C D
Xi Scorpii A C
Struve 1999 (HD 144087) (D&E of XiScorpii) D E
Beta Scorpii A C
Nu Scorpii A C
Otto Struve 525 A C
31 Cygni A C D
Struve 2816 (HR8281) A C D
Delta Cephei A