Quote:
Originally Posted by Saturnine
Don't know if you have seen this ( Wiki is your friend ) but it does a good job of explaining the movements of Alpha Centauri A & B and shows how the PA and Separation change over time. When I first saw them through a telescope in the mid 60s' they were quite wide apart, about 12.0" I think and now they have closed to about 4.0". Just a game of patience and long memory but the spectroscopy angle for short period binaries looks interesting.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alpha_Centauri |
I have measured lots of binary stars using spectroscopy. It is quite interesting.
An example is del1 Tel that I have attached. The zip file is an animated gif showing the change in the Hydrogen alpha line with time. It is slightly too big to upload as a gif to this forum. Each frame is 1 day apart. The period is 18.8 days so easy to observe from night to night. Some are much faster with periods of a few days.
All were taken with a commercial LHIRES spectrograph.
Terry