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Double Star Editions

Click the Index button to download only the index pdf, click the Planfile & Tours button to download only the AstroPlanner planfiles and tours. Use the green download button to download the complete edition. Please read Downloading CSOG and iPad Astronomy.

Data from the Washington Double Star Catalog (WDS), through AstroPlanner, was used to compile the CSOG Double Star editions.

CSOG's Double Star Editions Observing Guide Format

Contrary to CSOG's observing guides for deepsky objects and carbon stars, the double star observing guides do not contain images. However, when using CSOG's double star observing guides at the eyepiece, on a tablet as per its intended use, extra information and an image can often come in handy. For example, when a close double in a busy star field is to be split and it's difficult to determine which star in the field of view is (the primary star of) the double, before applying magnification. Or when you want to determine if something faint and fuzzy nearby is perhaps a galaxy or nebula, whether that concentration of stars nearby is a cluster, etc.

To fix this hiatus, hyperlinks are added to the guides. Clicking the double star's …

  • WDS designator in the first column will open the page for that double star on the website Stelledoppie.it;
  • Designation in the second column will open a 75' POSS2 Blue DSS image;
  • Components in the third column will open a 75' POSS2 Red DSS image;
  • PA / Sep. (postion angle & separation) in the fifth column will open the double star in SIMBAD;
  • R.A. / Dec. (the coordinate in epoch J2000.0) in the final column will open Aladin Lite, centered on the object in a 30' (1/2°) DSS POSS2 Blue field.

The sample pages below are, respectively, the first page of the Struve Double Stars edition and the first page of the double stars in Burnham's Celestial Handbook edition for the constellation of Andromeda. Please click the download button below to download the samples in pdf, with hyperlinks.

On a tablet, depending on the application used to view the observing guide, links will open directly. For these double star observing guides used on Apple's iPad's, I recommend opening them in the application Filebrowser, as the application will open the links directly "in-app" without briefly generating a white splash screen. On Apple computers a dialogue window will pop up when clicking a link, as this is how the operating system MacOS handles links in pdf's.

As both the updated Struve and the new Burnham's double star editions come in this format with hyperlinks, both editions are marked as V2.0.