Tuesday, April 16, 2013

Easy Doubles Near The Messiers

I'm starting a new category of double star lists.  These will be easy doubles within a 4 degree radius of the various Messier objects.  Working the Messier list is popular with amateur astronomers, and here's a way to toss in a few double stars to boot.  Being only 4 degrees away keeps the double within close proximity of the Messier and also no further away than the diameter of the outer circle of a Telrad finder.  I'm hoping this will make it easier on those folks in light polluted skies and those that don't have goto mounts.  Again, these should be splittable in a minimum 4" scope.  The smallest separation is 5 arc seconds.  There should not be too many pairs with stars dimmer than mag 10, although there will be a few dimmer than that to test your optics.  Mag 12.5 will be about the limit.  Note: since many of the Messiers are close to each other, there will be some occasional overlap and redundancy of doubles across the lists.  The lists are here.

1 comment:

Bill Griffith said...

I got them Jerry Now it is raining here. ;-) I have a solar scope on the way so I suppose that that isn't helping either. :-)

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