How about double stars???

Hi everybody!

Does anyone of you observe double stars? I started to observe them about a year ago. I use the small time range when it's dark enough to see many stars but when it's still to bright for deep sky objekts.

greetings, Daniel

Absolutely! I do not observe DStars as a rule but I will include them in my star hop. The edges of my old Uranometria's are full of Dstar notes.

I'm have only been starting to observe double stars in the last year or so and have been sticking to the popular ones that may have different colors involved as they are 'nice' in my book. I have also been of late seeking out fairly close doubles of similar magnitude (near 7-10) with spacings in the 2-3" range for the purpose of better estimating seeing and have found once again that good old MegaStar is very handy for filtering although it does not allow you to say you want BOTH stars to be in some given range, only the primary.

I tend to look for doubles on not-so-hot nights and have found S&T to supply 'classic' double objects fairly frequently so my list grows as time move on . The April S&T highlights several in James Mullany's piece on page 60 and I have 3 I wish to take a peek at soon. Xi Boo, Algieba in Leo, and Porrima in Spika. I think I should figure out how many of the DeepMap600 I have seen so far but have not got round to that yet.

The writer of MegaStar, Emil Bonanno, really was a true pro and my hat is off to that although it is a real shame it is virtually unsupported for some time now. I wish I had the source code ... (and permission of course).

There is a nice Blue and Gold double star in the same field as the bright edge on galaxy NGC 4111 in Canes Venatici. Its a really nice 2 fer!! Its one of my most favorite views in any size telescope.

I enjoy challenging double stars. My most recent find is called Propus right near M35. It has a nearly 3 mag difference and only a 1.8 arcsecond seperation. It requires very good seeing , collimation and optics to get.

Absolutely, love 'em! Will get back to targeted double star observations in a year or so, as the relatively murky skies of the Netherlands often do not allow anything more than the brightest of DSO's to be observed. In the mean time I do pick up the odd one in the vicinity of DSO's that do reach my eyepiece. Nice bonus objects!
Back in 2007-2008 I observed a bunch of (mostly) Struve (STF, STT, etc.) doubles. Some were a challenge in an 8" SCT, some had color. Always a pleasure to observe and a great help in getting to know directions in the sky. Ever since logging double star observations I have stuck to a methodical approach of describing the view in the eyepiece, including directions. Despite this being a DSO forum, I can highly recommend double star observing. Plenty to see with less than optimum skies and/or interfering moonlight.