Hi there.
Seeing as the seeing was wonderful I took advantage and plundered Orion and Lepus for the following:
Struve 627: A pair of equal white stars in a busy field.
Struve 630: A pair of unequal members with the primary being a magnitude brighter.
17 Orionis: A beautiful orange primary is accompanied by a pale blue companion.
Beta Orionis: Rigel, despite the 6 magnitudes in their brightness I found this double easy at 103X, this might be due to their separation of 9.5", much closer and I might not have bagged it, or if the seeing was worse.
Struve 667: This pair sit in a sparse field with 2 magnitudes between brightnesses, both are white in colour with a comfortable 4" of separation.
Struve 664: A white pair of equal magnitude with a similar separation to Struve 667.
20 Orionis: This is a triple system, but the AB secondary is too faint at 13th magnitude. The AC companion is 10th magnitude and easier to pull in at a distance of 36". Both stars white.
Struve 700: Two white 7th magnitude stars of equal brightness separated by 4 minutes that were easily split at 103X.
Struve 697: A wide double of 6th and 8th magnitude components that were white in colour.
Struve 701: An unequal duo of white stars sitting in a field that contains a replica of Orion's Belt to the east.
Wnc 2: A tight yellow pair of unequal suns in an empty field.
31 Orionis: A big magnitude difference between this orange primary and it's white associate, 31 is 4th magnitude with the secondary being 9th magnitude. The pair were split thanks to the wide separation between them.
S 476: An equal 6th magnitude pair of white stars that dwelled in a sparse region of space.
S 473: With a 2 magnitude difference between the 6th magnitude white primary and red secondary the splitting of the pair was easy due to a 20" separation.
h 3759: A yellow pair of unequal suns, 3 magnitudes in the difference, are separated by 27".
Lal Hd78: What makes this pair unusual is that the companion has a purple tint to it, initially I was unable to see this, but when I racked the focusser out the purple tinge was visible. Now, with my achromat Vega and Rigel have a purple fringe, but when in focus this star had no false colour due to it's low magntiude. This is the first star I have seen with this colour occuring naturally and not as a result of optics.
In my time in observing doubles I have found that tight doubles of roughly equal magnitude are far easier to split than those of vastly different brightness levels, even if they are further apart. Therefore I will tackle a pair of 8th magnitude stars with a separation of 2" with more confidence of a split than a 2nd magnitude primary with a 7th magnitude secondary with twice the separation.
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
  