Polaris B / SAO 305

[Stu]

I’ve split this off from another thread where it got a bit lost. Any comments welcomed.

On Skysafari 7 Polaris confuses me. It shows SAO 305 at a very similar position to Polaris B, but not quite the same eg Polaris B is shown at 18.4”/236 degrees/mag 9.1 and SAO 305 is 18.8”/232 degrees/mag 8.2. Are they the same star or not? There aren’t two stars that show in the same position around Polaris so it must be Polaris B.

Comments in this thread by @chiltonstar imply it is a different star half a degree away from Polaris but I can’t find this on SkySafari, nor do I recall seeing it??

 

[Stu]

Just doing a kind of bump for this as it seems to appear at the original date it was posted in another thread.

[Captain Scarlet]

SIMBAD which I’ve screenshotted suggests SAO 305 and Polaris B are the same star.

[7170]

I'm late to this party, but here is an image of Polaris A,B,C and D (subs taken in November just before this thread was created coincidently). I have stacked subs of different exposures and played with curves in an extreme way to try and show each companion. It is hard to do due to the magnitude differences between them all and I didn't take an ideal range of exposures to do this as it wasn't the intention. Pixel scale is 1.29"/px.

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@Stu SAO 305 is Polaris B, and the designation covers pairs BC and BD where as SAO 308 is Polaris Aa/A and covers pairs AaAb, AB, AC and AD. With AaAb and AB being physical doubles.