Tuesday, March 01, 2022

started into AVDS

Tonight I started to read a new book, An Anthology of Visual Double Stars. The heavy soft-cover tome is by Bob Argyle, Mike Swan, and Andrew James.

I was excited that there was a new book on double stars so I just kinda blindly bought it without really looking into it too much in advance. For example, I didn't know that it featured 175 selected celestial gemstones. They describe their subjects "the night sky's most interesting double and multiple stars."

front cover of An Anthology of Visual Double Stars

The approach is intriguing where they do a deep dive into each system covering the history and recent measurements, and providing a finder chart and orbital plots.

It also made me wonder how many I've seen...

Noted a fun fact early on. Frank Acfield gave Bob Argyle a copy of Norton Star Atlas when he was starting out. Frank hails from Newcastle-on-Tyne. Ha ha. Where the David Dunlap Observatory telescope and dome was designed and tested.

I like how the authors said that "none are the same." Indeed. Double stars are unique. Like snowflakes.

In chapter 2, they briefly talked about a variety of techniques for measuring double stars. This is topical for me as as I prepare for the citizen science talk at RASC Montreal in a month or so. I was pleased that I generally got them all. Whew. 

Purchased as a little Christmas gift to myself.

Looking forward to it.

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