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Old 03-12-2007, 11:10 AM
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carlos_dfc carlos_dfc is offline
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Re: Castor and Pollux

Hi

At the times that most people in UK will look at the sky (7pm until about 11pm)
Castor and Pollux are positioned to the left of Mars.
Can't miss Mars - very bright, and orangey, to the east (climbing higher as the night goes on)

Also - unfortunately, you can't see all 6 elements in the Castor system.
If you look with a telescope, at high-ish magnification, you'll see that Castor appears to be a very tight double star (only 3 arcseconds separation)
Both of the elements you see are themselves VERY tight doubles - so close together that a telescope can't separate them, a sectroscope is required to detect that they are doubles.
Then, a little below Castor, is a dimmer star, at just over 1 arcminute away (70 arcsec) This is also a spectroscopic bimary, and is gravitationally bound to the other Castor stars.

note:
There's another star, 3 arcmins to the right of Castor - it is unrelated to the Castor system, and is simply coincidentally quite close to our line-of-sight.

I often advise astronomy beginners to use Castor as a test of their telescope's optics.
A very good telescope will be able to 'just' separate the two brightest elements at around 50x - whereas a poor scope will require 150x and higher - a bad scope won't be able to separate them.
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