Hi, I have been trying to get an understanding of how the separation between double stars looks in the eyepiece of my telescope. With quite a number of double stars both the primary and secondary stars are obvious. However, with other double stars it is not so obvious. I was looking at Gamma Leporis and I was fairly confident as to which star was the secondary. Unfortunately, the info on Gamma Leporis only referred to the secondary as Gamma Leporis B. Entering in “Gamma Leporis B” into the search function returned no result. Reading the info on the star that I thought was the secondary revealed that it was a double star but didn’t link it to Gamma Leporis. It wasn’t until I Googled Gamma Leporis that I discovered that the secondary star is HR 1982. Using this number I confirmed that the star I suspected was in fact the secondary star. I just feel that more could be done to help, novices in particular, to identify the secondaries of double stars. Thank you.
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Jbellingham My above comment is referring to SkySafari 6
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Bill Tschumy Double star information is somewhat troublesome. Sometimes the catalogs we use directly refer to the AB pairs and sometimes the secondary has a different designation. Or database is built programmatically and we cannot always match the secondary with the B component.
One thing you can often do is look in the object info and see what the secondary's separation and position angle is from the primary. Then, in the chart, zoom in so you see the primary and the star you suspect is the secondary. Make sure the primary is selected and choose "Measure From" from the Selection popup menu. The tap the suspected secondary. We display the separation and position angle from the selected object. See if this matches the same statistics in the object info. If so you are done, if not you can tap the endpoint in the chart and drag it to other possible candidates.
Generally this is not needed. In most cases we do label the A & B components in the chart and it becomes obvious.
You will notice that the secondary star of Gamma Leporis is labelled AK Leporis.
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