Stelle Doppie Search Engine for the Washington Double Star Catalog

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mikemarotta
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Stelle Doppie Search Engine for the Washington Double Star Catalog

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Post by mikemarotta »


Several people here mentioned Stelle Doppie in passing as a tool for finding double stars to target.
https://www.stelledoppie.it
Stelle Doppie ("double stars" in Italian) is a set of tools for searching the Washington Double Star Catalog (WDS).
On the homepage, they say:
If you login you can:
- personalize the site according to you preferences
- filter out doubles you can't observe
- input you reports
- keep tracks of you favourite doubles.
Enjoy the site even without login

I registered as a user. On my profile, I entered the aperature of my objective and the focal length; and that allows me to filter by the stars which I can exect to see.

You can also view Triples and Multiples. In addition to the WDS they have the supporting catalogues by Otto Struve and Johann Friedrich Struve, and both Wilhelm Hershel and John Frederick William Herschel.

Stelle Doppie also provides filters for binocular and naked eye doubles.
Overview
The Washington Double Star Catalog (WDS), maintained by the United States Naval Observatory (USNO), is the world's principal database of astrometric double and multiple star information. The WDS Catalog contains positions, discoverer designations, epochs, position angles, separations, magnitudes, spectral types, proper motions and when available, Durchmusterung numbers and notes for the components of close to 100,000 systems based on ~600,000 means. The current version at the HEASARC is updated weekly and is derived from the version available online at the USNO (see http://ad.usno.navy.mil/proj/WDS/), the latter being updated nightly.

The Washington Visual Double Star Catalog (WDS) is the successor to the Index Catalogue of Visual Double Stars, 1961.0 (IDS; Jeffers & van den Bos, 1963). Three earlier double star catalogs in the 20th century, those by Burnham (BDS; 1906), Innes (SDS; 1927), and Aitken (ADS; 1932), each covered only a portion of the sky. Both the IDS and the WDS cover the entire sky, and the WDS is intended to contain all known visual double stars for which at least one differential measure has been published. The WDS is continually updated as published data become available. Prior to this, two major updates have been published (Worley & Douglass 1984, 1997). The Washington Double Star Catalog (WDS) has seen numerous changes since the last major release of the catalog. The application of many techniques and considerable industry over the past few years has yielded unprecedented gains in both the number of systems and the number of measures.
Note, however:
The USNO websites aa.usno.navy.mil, ad.usno.navy.mil, aristarchus.usno.navy.mil, maia.usno.navy.mil, rorf.usno.navy.mil, toshi.usno.navy.mil, and tycho.usno.navy.mil are undergoing modernization efforts. The expected completion of the work and the estimated return of service is Fall 2020, subject to change due to potential impacts of COVID-19.
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Michael E. Marotta
Astro-Tech 115 mm APO Refractor Explore Scientific 102 mm f/6.47 Refractor Explore Scientific 102 mm f/9.8 Refractor Bresser 8-inch Newtonian Reflector Plössls from 40 to 6 mm Nagler Series-1 7mm. nonMeade 14 mm. Mounts: Celestron AVX, Explore Twilight I Alt-Az, Explore EXOS German Equatorial
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