A new common proper motion double star in Serpens

I had originally recorded my discovery of this pair just after
midnight on the night of 29th April 2011, noting they had not been
catalogued in the WDS and are still ommitted from the current edition,
as I write.

On that night I observed and sketched three doubles in total, two in
Bootes and one pair in Serpens. I discarded the other two pairs, as
they were a tad too wide and appeared visually faint to be acceptable
as worthwhile double stars in the eyepiece. The Serpens pair is
located at RA: 15 46 18.197, Dec: +13 45 43.19 and the two stars are
of V-mags, 9.6, 9.8.

I made a provisional measurement of this pair using my Meade MA 12mm
Astrometric Illuminated Eyepiece on my Skywatcher 8-inch on 1st May
2011 as follows:

Position Angle: 55 degrees (+/- 5 degrees error margin)
Separation: 30” (+/- 0.5” error margin)

From the PPMXL Catalog (Roeser+ 2010), the proper motions of each star
in this pair are virtually identical:-

A component: 20.9, -1.2
B component: 20.9, 1.6

Also, their apparent magnitudes of 9.6 and 9.8 are in remarkably close
agreement with their spectral types of F8V and G0V. All the
indications are this is likely to be a physical pair, as I had
demonstrated previously for similar pairs in my paper DSSC18 (2010).


Abdul Ahad


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