Welcome to the Double Star section!

I am by no means a professional astrophotographer!
Regardless, I've taken some pictures & decided to make a page for them.

The camera used is a Canon Powershot G5 Digital Camera with a 7.2 - 28.8mm lens. All pictures were taken afocal or "through-the-eyepiece" with one of my various 'scopes using an Orion SteadyPix camera mount. As to date, no tracking device or stacking programs were used on any of the pictures.

Why double stars you ask? When I first got into astronomy and heard about double stars, I thought: why would anybody want to look at just a star? Here in Las Vegas, on any given night, there are way more stars on-stage then there are in the night sky.
Shortly, I started running out of deep-sky objects to look at from my backyard. So, I naturally moved on to hunting for doubles. Some of them can be very challenging to find. Some of them are visible naked-eye (not split of course!) even from my light-polluted skies. All of them are visible in a 6 x 30 finderscope and can even split in the finderscope. Actually, the more fun ones are the ones that take medium to high power before they split. I've found great pleasure in double star hunting. As you can see...many of them are different colors. Plus, double stars are still obtainable even when the moon is out! Ok...here they are!
Don't forget to hold your cursor over the pix for additional messages or information.

Twinkle Twinkle

- ANDROMEDA / "The Chained Princess" ---

Almach

 

- ARIES / "The Ram" ---

Gamma  Lambda

 

- BOOTES / "The Herdsman" ---

Mag=4.46 & 5.75, Sep=5.5''

 

- CANCER / "The Crab" ---

Iota Cancri  Rho1 Cancri  Zeta Cancri

 

- CANES VENATICI / "The Hunting Dogs" ---

Alpha Canum Venatorum

 

- CASSIOPEIA / "The Queen" ---

Eta Cassiopeia

 

- CYGNUS / "The Swan" ---

61  Albireo

I've never been able to split this one with the telescope. Only the camera can split it  Omnicron

 

- GEMINI / "The Twins" ---

Alpha Geminorum

 

- LEO / "The Lion" ---

Alpha Leonis  Gamma2 Leonis

 

- LYRA / "The Lyre" ---

The Double-Double

 

- ORION / "The Hunter" ---

1 second exposure @ f/4  1" exposure @ f/2 x 3 frames stacked

 

- TAURUS / "The Bull" ---

Not a very good split

 

- URSA MAJOR / "The Greater Bear" ---

Zeta Ursa Majoris

 

- URSA MINOR / "The Lesser Bear" ---

OTHER PLACES TO VISIT WITHIN MY REALM -

 

Stay close to home...     ...stay within the Solar System..     ...or head out to deep space!

Back to the Astrophotography page     Telescope Reviews

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THIS PAGE WAS CREATED ON OCTOBER, 18, 2003
&
UPDATED ON OCTOBER, 19, 2004
 
PLEASE SEND E-MAIL TO:
brad@starnevada.com

Copyrite 2003