Lyra doubles

[Ags]

Had a look at a few doubles tonight all easy to find.

Struve 1825 - located one degree north of Arcturus, this is quite quite tight and faint in my Skymax 102, although the sky still had a bit of blue when I was observing it. Given the twilight and limited aperture I couldn't see any color. Others have seen yellow and orange.

Epsilon Lyrae and Zeta Lyrae - Epsilon is a wide double even in my 8x50 finder, but I was pleased to see the finder could split Zeta too.

Otto Struve 525 - easy to find inside the Lyra parallelogram, it seemed an unequal pair with an off-white primary and faintly blue secondary. It is split about as widely as Zeta and Beta.

Beta Lyrae - A bright easily split white pair, the stars seemed less unequal than expected (primary varies between 3.4 to 4.4, secondary is only 8.6).

Struve 2470 and Struve Struve 2474 - I did not find these but at least when I checked my star map on my laptop I could see clearly where I went wrong! So that's a win for my cartography

Looking at my chart, I should have started at Sulafat, and hopped backwards past two pairings of stars to the third pairing - of these Struve 2470 is the northern one and 2474 is the southern one. I examined the first two pairings, but did not star hop far enough away from Sulafat. By the way, what is the right term for star hopping in right ascension - east/west is not quite right?

Edited May 17, 2021 by Ags

[Mr Spock]

A nice report. There are some good doubles in that area.

[Ags]

On 17/05/2021 at 00:28, Ags said:

Struve 2470 and Struve Struve 2474 - I did not find these

Well, tonight I did. Light pollution was dreadful; the neighbors have decided to uplight a tree that looms over the garden. This is in addition to the fairy lights they've strung along the top of the fence.

The two doubles were both visible in the field of a 20mm Plossl (0.7° true field). The split between the doubles was exactly the amount needed to place one double in my blind spot, so if I looked at one pair the other would disappear.

[Stu]

5 minutes ago, Ags said:

Well, tonight I did. Light pollution was dreadful; the neighbors have decided to uplight a tree that looms over the garden. This is in addition to the fairy lights they've strung along the top of the fence.

The two doubles were both visible in the field of a 20mm Plossl (0.7° true field). The split between the doubles was exactly the amount needed to place one double in my blind spot, so if I looked at one pair the other would disappear.

As known as the Double Double’s double I believe 😉. A nice sight to see all four together, though unfortunate about your blind spot!

[Ags]

I'd heard of the double double's double, and thought this might be it. M57 is not too far away from these, maybe we should rename it the double double's double's bubble!

[cotterless45]

Beautiful area , rich in binaries , enjoy the exploration, Nick.

[Ags]

Went over the area again with my C6 this time instead of the Skymax 102. The extra aperture really added to the view of the double double's double. Also got a lot more color out of O. Struve 525. Dropped in on Albireo and 61 Cygni too. Got a much better view of M13 and M57. Aperture rules. But I  did spend half my time doubting my collimation, although the C6 did split Zeta Lyrae nicely, better than the Mak in my opinion! The SCT attracted dew pretty quickly tonight sadly.

Edited May 29, 2021 by Ags