Top 200 most beautiful Double Stars

The Coldfield Observatory

This Top 200 list gives you the easiest and most beautiful double stars of the night sky, quikly found in your telescope. This is not, like many other lists, an extract from a database filtering the brightest double stars. It is a summary of 200 double stars easily spotted, easily split, and mostly with different and nice colors. All 200 doubles from this list are observed by the author, equiped with a 6 inch f8 Newtonian reflector. The magnification used was never higher than 200x. All doubles are not below the declination of -12.

Double stars are pretty nice objects against the black sky for every observer. A pair of equally bright stars close to each other is very attractive. And different colors make it complete! When there are 3 or even more members, it only becomes more splendid, like the triple Struve 2816 in Cepheus. Some triples appear as a real triangle figure, like Otto Struve 147 in Auriga. And why not to spot the doubles embedded in a rich open star cluster, like Struve 485 in Camelopardalis? This list also contains a few doubles in the Pleiades, and in the Beehive or Praesepe M44.

It's very obvious, photographs never bring the astonishing spectacle, like an observer can feel thru his telescope. You only see gray disks on a photograph, while amazing colored points, not touching each other and with different brightnesses, glitter right in the middle of your ocular. The marvelous double 61 Cygni along the milky way, the first star with a measured parallax, as an example.

Keep in mind, the colors of a double star are very subjective. There are several reasons. When the secondary is much fainter than the primary, the condition of the sky, the color-sensitivity of the observer, and the aperture of the telescope. The colors of bright binaries are best seen thru binoculars. And our eyes are more yellow sensitive since we all look to a big yellow sun.