Double Star Observing Intro - Perfect Telescope Objects for the Full Moon / Light Pollution! 

Great points! Doubles are a beautiful find on a moonlit night! Colors and sizes differences. Separation differences and magnitude differences make doubles a beautiful pursuit. And that goes for moonless nights when you've done all your other observing list stuff. Doubles keep you going!!😂

Double stars can be fun but if the Moon is out, I have no problem with observing it. Who knows, maybe I'll beat longer odds than winning the lottery and spot a meteor impact!

I love double stars. Much neglected with the flash and bang of imaging DSO's

I love splitting challenging doubles, there is a satisfaction in seeing them come a part as you zoom in. My project is to at least include 4 to 5 doubles below 1 arcs after I have had enough of looking at the planets. Doing this keeps me busy and motivate me to go out again to complete at least 50 doubles a year. Scope used a Celestron 9.25” and a 4” Frac F6 side by side as I love putting them though their paces together 😅

Very Nice Video. I love Splitting Double stars, hence I've been trying to split some Really tight Ones. This Season I Tried splitting Epsilon Lyrae, it was pretty Good. Last Winter Though I was Successfully able to Split Sirius (A/B), that Tiny White Dwarf, with a 3x Barlow on my 5 inch Telescope. The Huge Magnitude diffrence makes It really hard To notice, But After a Bit of Practice. I'm Able to Detect them!

I ended up buying the Cambridge Double Star Atlas and it comes with a nice star atlas too. It is based off the Washington Double Star, WDS catalogue from the US Naval Observatory, the most comprehensive Double Star catalogue extant. It covers primary stars of binaries to 7.75 apparent magnitude and secondary stars to 13.5, but Will Tirion eliminated 850 systems not visible by amateure telescopes. It covers 2500+ systems visible from Earth.

Great video as usual! I recently got my first taste of a carbon star........I was recently at a public astronomy event and was showing members of the public southern hemisphere deep space objects (Im in sydney, aus) when someone came up and mentioned I should show ruby crucis (DY Crucis) in the southern constellation crux. It was such a beautiful rich red! AND thanks to you I got a baader zoom (It's become my go-to EP) so I could really zoom into it with my skywatcher 12 inch dob. I'll look into the book/atlas you mentioned. Thanks Vlad!

I first looked at Mizar and Alcor in my C6-N 150mm f5 and then took Mizar down to about 125x with a 6mm Baader Orthoscopic and it came in very well with two distinctive round dots, one bigger than the other. I got hooked on double stars. One of the reasons I bought a 127mm MCT Sky Watcher was for doubles and even a few triples. I find myself going through my Cambridge Star Atlas looking for double stars, but it only goes down to 6 magnitude stars. I'm going to get that double star atlas you've linked, thanks Vlad. I'm going to take your advice and use my new 102mm Apo to check them out.

I'm buying an iOptron AZ Pro that can take two scopes, up to 43 lbs total, so 30 lbs easy. Has gps and its own 8 hour battery. Says 10 hours, but I figure 8 hours just because they tend to exaggerate. I'll get an 8SE used since my astronomy club might have one coming up for sale I can put a 2" diagonal on it. (I can't believe they sell a 9.25" scope with a 1.25" diagonal just so it can fit on their mounts.) The AZ Pro has a 212,000 object database that carries SAO, HD catalogs Tyco, Hip and Gaia etc. plus the same ones the Nexstar and SynScan do. So it _should_ be able to find the dimmer 7.7 magnitude stars although I have magnified finder scopes it's nice to think I can punch it into my database and slew to it. Not all the Henry Draper catalog double stars have a Smithsonian Astronomical Observatory numbers and I punched an HD star by Orion into my son's Nexstar and it wasn't in there though the SAOs are. I use Stellarium and it uses a lot of ty, HD, hip, and Gaia designations that probably have a SAO or NGC number, but they often don't list them. The HD star by Orion also has an NGC number as well. So having the HD catalogue lets me plan with Stellarium. That 127 Mak with some orthos and TV Possls is great for doubles. I put magnified RACI 8x50 finders on two of my scopes and the 6x30 for my Maks. Just easier for me.

Vlad, a totally off topic question but one I wish to ask you because you've observed through one and said how good the optics were. I'm looking at an LS6 UHTC ACF OTA for less than $300. No dovetail however. Would you say that is a good deal? Also, is it easy to find and install a dovetail on one of these when you have that Eclips camera in the way? I already have an 8 inch LX10 but my idea for using that (on original fork with both motors still working) is mainly planetary at F10. My thoughts for the 6 inch would be to use the x0.63 corrector I already have and use primarily for EAA on an EQ5 mount. I then also have a StarTravel 120 and an SVBony 70ED and was wondering if the Star Travel 120 with a decent filter like the Baader Contrast Booster of Baader 495 longpass would be decent for EAA also. The SVBony for wide angle and using on my Star Adventurer 2i. Your thoughts? Cheers.

You definitely need aperture to split the really tight double stars. Saying that I split so many with a 70mm refractor.