By Bill Pellerin, GuideStar Editor

Houston Astronomical Society

The Astronomical League has a Double Star Club, which I highly recommend (and which I completed some years ago). The program requires you to observe 100 double stars and to record those observations in an observing log with a drawing of the double star (anybody can put a pair, or more, of dots in a circle).

If that is not enough double star observing for you, there are additional resources that you can use to continue your double star observing program. The two books that I will review for this article will keep you in the double star observing business for a long time. Which of these two books is appropriate for you depends on how you like to go about your observing program.

The two books are:

• Double Stars for Small Telescopes – by Sissy Haas
• The Cambridge Double Star Atlas – by James Mullaney and Wil Tirion

The Haas book includes 2100 double stars to see and the Mullaney/Tirion book has 2400 stars. Both books include double stars visible from both the northern and the southern hemisphere, so for most observers not all of the stars in the books will be accessible. Both are large format books useful in the field but only the Mullaney/Tirion book is spiral bound, allowing it to lie flat on the table.

Here are the two books.

The Cambridge Double Star Atlas, by James Mullaney and Wil Tirion (March, 2009)

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