Hi Vince
Looking at your image and based on my interpretation of orientation and distance, I don’t think that the smaller star near Sirius is a good candidate for being Sirius B, and here is my reasoning:
- When comparing your star field to SkyTools, the smaller companion star in your image seems to be located about North of Sirius A, whereas I understand Sirius B to be East of Sirius A.
- Looking at the overall image scale, the distance between GSC 05949-2774 and Sirius is 5’ 27”, which is 327 arcsecs. Using this as a yardstick, I estimate that the distance between Sirius A (centroid) and your candidate star to be around 50 or 60 arcsecs? The published value is just over 8 arcsecs for the year 2008.
I could be wrong, and it would be nice if that were the case! I wonder if anyone else can shed any further light on this, or verify that I have N & E correctly oriented.
Cheers
Dennis