Measurements of visual double stars with PISCO2 at the Nice 76-cm refractor in 2013-2014

Description

We present relative astrometric and photometric measurements of visual double stars made in 2013-2014 with PISCO2 installed at the 76-cm refractor of the Côte d'Azur Observatory in Nice (France). Our observation list contains orbital couples as well as double stars whose motion is still uncertain. Three different techniques were used for obtaining measurements: Lucky Imaging, Speckle Interferometry, and the Direct Vector Autocorrelation method. From our observations of 4,864 multiple stars, we obtained 4,952 new measurements with angular separations in the range 0″.1-14″ and an average accuracy of 0″.015. The mean error on the position angles is 1°.0. Most of the position angles were determined without the usual 180° ambiguity with the application of the direct vector autocorrelation technique and/or by inspection of the Lucky images or the long integration files. We managed to routinely monitor faint systems (m_V ≈ 9-11) with large magnitude differences (up to Δm_V ≈ 5). We have thus been able to measure 49 systems containing red dwarf stars that had been poorly monitored since their discovery, from which we estimated the stellar masses thanks to Gaia measurements. We also measured the magnitude difference of the two components of 318 double stars with an estimated error of 0.2 mag. Except for a few objects that have been discussed, our measurements are in good agreement with the ephemerides computed with published orbital elements, even for the double stars whose separation is smaller than the diffraction limit. Thanks to good seeing images and with the use of high-contrast numerical filters, we have also been able to obtain 455 measurements with an angular separation smaller than the diffraction limit of our instrumentation, and consistent with those obtained with larger telescopes. Finally, we report 378 measurements of the 296 new double stars that we found in the files obtained during the observations.

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