Photographing Double Stars

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Willem Jan Drijfhout avatar

This week I photographed three double stars, the first three objects of the Astronomical League Double Star Observing Program. Exposures of these stars is typically very short. For some of them even 0.1s. It also makes processing a bit of a challenge because regular processing tools do not always work and manual work needs to be done. Anyway, here are the three objects in field of views of 2’ x 2’. 📷 Inzets.pngInzets.png

Details on this little project can be found on my website.

The project made me wonder if there would be examples of double stars that can be reasonably imaged and have short enough periods that in a few months to a year, an almost full orbit can be captured? That would make for some exciting GIF sequence… If you know of a potential candidate, please let us know.

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Habib Sekha avatar

Hi Willem Jan, sounds very interesting and the idea of a gif is as you already mentioned very exciting!

As a matter of coincidence someome on the Dutch astroforum used sharcap to register the images and ‘separate’ a double star, which he posted today.

Perhaps his approach might be of some interest.

https://www.astroforum.nl/threads/mu-cygni-stf-2822-ab-een-met-moeite-gescheiden-paar.1484143/

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Willem Jan Drijfhout avatar

Habib Sekha · Sep 18, 2025 at 08:52 PM

Hi Willem Jan, sounds very interesting and the idea of a gif is as you already mentioned very exciting!

As a matter of coincidence someome on the Dutch astroforum used sharcap to register the images and ‘separate’ a double star, which he posted today.

Perhaps his approach might be of some interest.

https://www.astroforum.nl/threads/mu-cygni-stf-2822-ab-een-met-moeite-gescheiden-paar.1484143/

Thanks Habib, that is a nice coincidence indeed! Just replied to the astroforum post as well. He suggests the live-stacking in Sharpcap, which indeed could work very well in these cases.

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