The sky was dark and clear when I returned home very early Tuesday morning, so I brought out my Meade NG60-SM 60 refractor for some more double star viewing:
The double stars selected come from the “Double Star Marathon Observing List” which is a list of 110 double stars theoretically doable with a 60mm refractor which Gabrielle (Lady Fraktor) provided back in 2020 on this website. I started going through this list on 3/17/20 and stopped on 7/3/20, before resuming on 9/16/22 (a little over 2 yrs. later) with my previous report.
I used a 32mm Plossl at 22x to star hop and then a 9mm MH (Modified Huygens) at 78x and a 6.3mm Plossl at 111x to split the doubles. Here were the targets:
STF 2819 Cep (
epsilon Peg (
xi Cep (
8 Lac (
STF 3053 Cas (
alpha Cas (
eta Cas (
I was able to separate all these doubles using 78x. Even at 22x I was able to detect the fainter companions of epsilon Peg (m=8.4) and alpha Cas (m=9.0) because of the wide separation (142” and 69.5”, respectively) and the darkness of the sky.
The views of the stars through a refractor are exquisite, something you can’t get from a Newtonian reflector.
Late Tuesday evening:
I was a bit fatigued later that evening, but I still went outside again with the same scope to observe these doubles:
kappa Cep (
h1470 Cyg (
STF 163 Cas (
gamma Ari (
lambda Ari (
gamma And (
Kappa Cep I was unable to split because of the large contrast in magnitudes and the small separation between the pair (a 70mm ‘frac might work on this one). H1470 Cyg took a while to find because I got lost in the rich star fields of Cygnus. Fortunately, the other 4 were easier to find and split. Gamma And provided the most color contrast between the pairs (yellow and light bluish), while gamma Ari was the most striking because of the identical magnitude of the pairs and the small separation between them. Lambda Ari was a very wide double, visible even through my star hopping eyepiece (22x). STF 163 Cas was another wide pair, but required higher magnification (78x) to see the companion.
A few more sessions and I should be able to complete this list of 110 doubles started back in March 2020.