Hi folks
Despite having to be up early for work, I couldn't resist setting up the scope and doing an hour or so, I kept my search area in the region of Altair and pulled in the following doubles.
STF 2613: A close double consisting of a light yellow primary with white companion, both stars are close in magnitudes, 7 & 7.5, this made it an easy enough split, in the 110mm I got daylight, so to speak, with a magnification of 74.
STF 2590: This was a more difficult split due to the variance of the stars, 7 & 10, both were white in colour, a separation of 13 helped, though the companion was faint enough, and the sky has not achieved true darkness, that it required careful observing to tease out the secondary.
STF 2628: Close at 3.5, a 6th magnitude mid yellow primary is accompanied by a 8th magnitude white companion, split them using a combination of my Vixen LVW 22mm and 2.5X Powermate, magnification X74.
STF 2635: Another wide variance in magnitudes, the deep yellow primary is 7th magnitude, the white secondary glows dimly at 10th magnitude. A separation of 7.4 helped, but again, this required patience to tease out, I had to wait for ideal seeing to confirm the secondary. X135 did the trick.
STF 2570: White stars this time, close at 4.1, 7.5 & 9.5 magnitudes, X135 got the space between them, once more patience was needed.
STF 2567: Twins to STF 2570, in as much as the stars are the same colours and the same magnitudes. This pair are wide though, a separation of 18 makes them an easy grab at X74.
STF 2562: Back to yellow and white, a popular colour combination it seems, the 6.5 magnitude primary has a nice canary yellow tint to it, the 8th magnitude companion is white. This is an easy pair to split, X59 was sufficient to do the job.
HJ 1477: This was the most difficult pair of the evening, though worth observing for the beautiful traffic light red primary that glows at 8th magnitude, the white companion is faint, 10.5 magnitude, I observed them at X135, but as before, I had to wait for that moment of clarity to confirm the secondary.
STF 2616: A pale orange primary of 7th magnitude was pleasant to see, the 9.5 magnitude white companion was very close by, separation 3.3, this took a lot of eye strain to split, with the size of my scope and the seeing, I believe that I would not be able to split them if the separation were under 3.
STF 2629: A white pair, magnitudes 7 & 10, they are wide at 9.2, yet they were not too easy to split, I put this down to the seeing, I had to use averted vision to tease the secondary into view and it was fleeting, seeming to appear and disappear.
The region around Altair is not bathed in swathes of stars, this makes the job of hunting down doubles that much easier.
Last night was also a first, observing in shorts and t-shirt, viva la heatwave.
Paul
Programming today is a race between software engineers striving to build bigger and better programs, and the universe trying to produce bigger and better idiots. So far, the universe is winning.
Rich Cook
  