New books just published for the keen amateur astronomer

After a lot of nagging by my "nearest and dearest" I have finally completed four books on amateur astronomy. All these books can all the purchased from Amazon and it would be much appreciated if readers here would buy some or all of them. I have tried to cover those areas that "other authors cannot reach" rather than endlessly revisiting the same aspects of our great hobby again and again!

Providing these are not a commercial disaster I have a few other books ready to release on the unsuspecting world.

1) Discover your own double star

There are not many branches of science where amateurs regularly contribute significant observations or discoveries. Astronomy is somewhat different, not least because the number of professional astronomers is relatively small and observing time at the major observatories is very limited. This has left some areas of astronomy where amateurs can contribute. In the past measuring the orientation and separation of binary stars and the identification and characterisation of new binary stars were identified as two examples of "useful" amateur projects.

Most amateur astronomers dream of making a discovery that will appear in all the standard catalogues. This book shows how to make your dreams come true.


2) 1800 new double stars for amateur observers
This book isn't intended for the astronomical data-miner or the budding astrophysicist so if you buy it expecting to find a detailed analysis of data management techniques or the latest theories on double star formation you will be greatly disappointed.

But if you are an amateur astronomer interested in observing double stars this book will fill your heart with joy. If you are tired of seeing the same old lists of double stars with the same, decades old, descriptions then you will love this book because none of these 1800+ double stars have ever been catalogued before!

The first few pages contain an introduction the catalogue - the why and the how behind its creation. The heart of the book is a detailed list of these new targets organised by constellation and then by right ascension within the constellation. Detailed information on coordinates, magnitudes, separation, position angle and colour is given for every pair.

This book represents a major step forward in popularising double star astronomy.


3) Identifying Identical Twin Star Systems from the SDSS Data Release 10
Data mining the SDSS Data Release 10 has yielded a total of 481 pairs of stars separated by
between 3 and 30 arc second where all five listed de-reddened magnitudes (u, g, r, i and z bands) for the two stars are within 0.05 magnitudes. 473 of these binary stars are believed to be new discoveries.
The SDSS provides photometry in five different wavebands and these results can be used to estimate the spectral energy distribution of the star. It is possible to extrapolate from the SDSS results obtained from previously studied stars to the absolute magnitude, and hence the distance, of previously unstudied stars. An extension of this idea of photometric parallax is the idea, presented for the first time in this paper, that if two stars have, essentially, identical re-reddened photometry in all five SDSS wavebands then they must be at the same distance, especially if the angular separation between them is less than 30 arc seconds.


4) Identifying Common Proper Motion Binary Star Systems
Data mining using the recently published 1500 square degree near infrared proper motion catalogue from the UKIDSS Large Area Survey has yielded 1220 common proper motion binary star systems of which 1129 appear to be new discoveries.

Each component of a common proper-motion pair can be considered to be at the same distance from the observer, of the same age and subject to the same degree of reddening. These pairs are an interesting area for both amateur and professional astronomers to research because they do not fall into either of the extensively studied groups of orbiting binary stars or open clusters.