
TL;DR
The paper traces the history and development of double star catalogs, highlighting key contributors, data collection methods, and the transition to an online database at the Washington Double Star Catalog.
Contribution
It provides a comprehensive historical overview of double star cataloging efforts and the evolution of data management leading to the current online catalog.
Findings
Compilation of historical double star cataloging efforts.
Transition from handwritten records to digital online database.
Key figures and institutions in double star astronomy.
Abstract
Astronomers have long tracked double stars in efforts to find those that are gravitationally-bound binaries and then to determine their orbits. Early catalogues by the Herschels, Struves, and others began with their own discoveries. In 1906 court reporter and amateur astronomer Sherburne Wesley Burnham published a massive double star catalogue containing data from many observers on more than 13,000 systems. Lick Observatory astronomer Robert Grant Aitken produced a much larger catalogue in 1932 and coordinated with Robert Innes of Johannesburg, who catalogued the southern systems. Aitken maintained and expanded Burnham's records of observations on handwritten file cards, and eventually turned them over to the Lick Observatory, where astrometrist Hamilton Jeffers further expanded the collection and put all the observations on punched cards. With the aid of Frances M. "Rete" Greeby he…
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