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:
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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