University of North Alabama

The principle way that we can obtain the masses of stars is through observations of binary stars. When A binary is close enough, both components can be imaged, and an orbital solution can give the masses. What is required is astrometric observations of these stars to observe the elliptical path of the secondary around the primary star. The proposed project will involve setting up a system to do speckle imaging of close double stars. The speckle imaging technique uses high speed imaging (100s frames per seconds) to “freeze” the effects of seeing on images (Labevrie 1970). Speckle imaging has been used to obtain diffraction-limited images of close double stars to allow astrometry of the components. The time to take the required observations is about ten minutes per pass-band, and so this makes a good first observing project. The group has been doing outreach to high schools students and publishing the results. Here we propose to emulate this work. The funds requested here will obtain the photometric filters and equipment to conduct the observations.