Journal of Double Star Observations Speckle Interferometry of Close Visual Binaries Editors: Russell Genet, Eric Weise, R. Kent Clark, & Vera Wallen Associate Editor: Meghan Legg Foreword: David Rowe Vol. 11 No. 1S September 15, 2015 Contents Editorial 177 Foreword 178 David Rowe Speckle Interferometry of Close Visual Binaries 183 Russell M. Genet Two New Triple Star Systems with Detectable Inner Orbital Motions and 200 Speckle Interferometry of 40 Other Double Stars Russell M. Genet, Henry Zirm, Francisco Rica, Joseph Richards, David Rowe, and Daniel Gray Double Star Research with Speckle Interferometry 214 Cameron Allen, Jason Goad, Ryan Morshead, Kaitlin McArdle, and Eric Weise A Novel System for Classifying Binary Orbital Solutions 219 Eric D. Weise and Russell M. Genet Portable Speckle Interferometry Camera Checkout at Kitt Peak 226 Russell Genet, Tom Smith, R. Kent Clark, Paul Wren, Hillary Mathis, Dave Summers, and Brent Hansey Kitt Peak Speckle Interferometry of Close Visual Binary Stars 234 David Rose, Tohams C. Smith, Alex Teiche, Richard Harshaw, Daniel Wallace, Eric Weise, Edward Wiley, Grady Boyce, Patrick Boyce, Detrick Branston, Kayla Chaney, R. Kent Clark, Chris Estrada, Reed Estrada, Thomas Frey, Wayne Green, Nathalie Haurberg, Greg Jones, John Kenney, Sheri Loftin, Izak McGieson, Rikita Patel, Josh Plummer, John Ridgely, Mark Truebood, Don Westergren, and Paul Wren First Speckle Interferometry Observation of Binary BU 1292 245 Meryl Adam, Stephanie Roberts, Miriam Schenk, Carmen VanRonk, Tara Loayza, Russell M. Genet, Bobby Johnson, Thomas C. Smith, and Paul Wren Speckle Interferometry Observation of Binary WDS 01528-0447 252 Meryl Adam, Eric Weiss, Bobby Johnson, Barron Lutes, Katie Huck, Ankur Patel, and Russell Genet International Speckle Interferometry Collaboration 256 Eric Weise, Yuan-Yuan Ding, Chaoyan Wang, and Russell M. Genet Kitt Peak Speckle Interferometry Program Database Generation 262 Alex S. Teiche User’s Guide to PS3 Speckle Interferometry Reduction Program 266 David Rowe and Russell M. Genet The Double Star Speckle Interferometry Observation and Reduction Process 277 Russell M. Genet Potential of the McMath-Pierce 1.6-Meter Solar Telescope for Speckle 289 Interferometry Richard Harshaw, Gregory Jones, Edward O. Wiley, Pat Boyce, Detrick Branston, David Rowe, and Russell M.Genet Testing of the McMath-Pierce 0.8-Meter East Auxiliary Telescope’s Acquisition 296 and Slewing Accuracy Richard Harshaw, Jimmy Ray, Lori Prause, David Douglass, Detrick Branston, and Russell M. Genet Close Binary Star Speckle Interferometry on the McMath-Pierce 0.8-Meter Solar 302 Telescope Edward O. Wiley, Richard Harshaw, Gregory Jones, Detrick Branston, Patrick Boyce, David Rowe, John Ridgely, Reed Estrada, and Russell Genet Speckle Interferometry with the McMath-Pierce East Auxiliary Telescope 307 Richard Harshaw, Jimmy Ray, David Douglass, Lori Prause, and Russell M. Genet Calibrating a CCD Camera for Speckle Interferometry 314 Richard Harshaw Speckle Interferometry of Short-Period Binary Stars 323 Russell M. Genet, John R. Ridgely, Alex Teiche, Edward Foley, Corey Christiansen, David Rowe, Neil Zimmerman, Keith Knox, Kith Hege, John Kenney, R. Kent Clark, Bruce Holenstein, Kakkala Mohanan, and James Armstrong Automated Speckle Interferometry of Double Stars 340 Alex S. Teiche, Russell M. Genet, David Rowe, Kyle C. Hovey, and Mitchell Gardner Observation of Large Delta-Magnitude Close Binaries with Shaped Aperture 343 Masks Edward L. Foley, Russell M. Genet, John R. Ridgely, David Rowe, and Neil T. Zimmerman Measurements of Double Stars Using a 280 mm Reflector and an EM-CCD 361 Jocelyn Sérot About the Editors 381 Vol. 11 No. 1S Journal of Double Star Observations | September 2015 Editorial Editorial This is a special issue of the Journal of Double Star Observations. Special issues bring related papers together. This promotes ease of access for readers, since the related papers are not spread throughout a number of different issues. Special issues also facilitate additional dissemination as a book. This special issue of the Journal of Double Star Observations is being published simultaneously as a book entitled Speckle Interferometry of Close Visual Doubles, published by the Collins Foundation Press. We thank the Society for Astronomical Sciences for permission to reprint the papers starting on pages 226, 234, & 343. The paper starting on page 340 previously appeared in the Journal of Double Star Observations. Special issues may be a set of papers on a single topic, such as speckle interferometry, or may be a set of papers resulting from a conference or a seminar. While the bulk of the papers in a single-topic special issue are original papers, some papers from earlier issues of the JDSO or other journals may be included to round out a topic or provide proper credit to earlier work. Regular, quarterly issues of the JDSO are edited and formatted by the JDSO editors. This allows papers to be submitted in almost any format. On the other hand, special issues of the JDSO are formatted following very specific instructions that allow the merging of the papers together with minimal effort, as well as easing their additional publication as a book when desired. To simplify the preparation of special issue papers, the papers may be prepared in Google Docs, Pages, or MS Word, following special issue Instructions to Authors. Papers prepared in Google Docs or Pages are submitted as MS Word.docx papers, using the “save as” function, for final merging and editing. An additional simplification that eases author preparation is the use of single instead of two-column format. Detailed Instructions to Authors for writing and formatting special issue papers will be provided in the next special issue of the JDSO. Many of these instructions have been borrowed from the Instructions to Authors for the Astronomical Journal and the Astrophysical Journal. We thank the AJ and ApJ for permission to adopt many of their instructions. Editors R. Kent Clark and Russell Genet Special Issue Guest Editors Eric Weise, Vera Wallen, Meghan Legg, and Cheryl Genet 177 Vol. 11 No. 1S Journal of Double Star Observations | September 2015 Foreword Foreword I received an email in late spring 2012 from Russ Genet. Russ had become interested in speckle interferometry as an outgrowth of his many years of teaching astronomical research by way of at-the- eyepiece measurements of double stars. He had just acquired a Luca-S emCCD camera and needed a telescope to try it on. The email described the camera and the observing program and asked if I knew of “a telescope in the 0.5 to 2 meter range” that could be used to make speckle observations. Russ knew that I had an operational PlaneWave Instruments CDK20 at my observatory deep in the Mojave desert. It has an aperture of 20” which satisfied his lower cutoff limit. I was also aware that Russ knew far more than I did about the availability of telescopes in this size range. Clearly, he was on a fishing expedition. I took a brief look into speckle interferometry and, like Russ, became fascinated with the subject. A long sequence of short exposure images is taken of an object, most often a double star, and the collection is processed in the Fourier domain, where the average power spectrum is computed. The power spectrum retains all of the high-spatial-frequency information available from the full aperture of the telescope, and upon taking the inverse Fourier transform, one finds the sub-arcsecond double star sparkling within the symmetric sidelobes of the autocorrellelogram, defiantly disobeying our well-known seeing-limited aphorism. Of course, I was hooked. So, Russ and I began planning an observing run at Pinto Valley Observatory (PVO) for mid- November. PVO is a small facility with a cabin, a bunkhouse, and an observatory. It is completely off- grid, with energy from solar panels and water from a well. It had old batteries that no longer held a complete charge. The 20” corrected Dall-Kirkham telescope and its German Equatorial mount were original prototypes. The telescope worked well but the mount was a bit cranky. The RA gear had 50 arcseconds of periodic error that repeated 15 times per rotation. Speckle interferometry sounds simple: Center a double star on a high-speed, low-noise camera. Take a thousand 20-millisecond images. Process the subsequent “FITS cube” using free software. However, in order to take advantage of the resolution that one can achieve with the technique, the full-resolution diffraction disk must be oversampled by a factor of 5 to 10 times. In practice, this means stacking Barlows before the camera until the effective focal ratio of the telescope is something around f/50 and the field of view is less than an arcminute. The old mount with its large backlash and periodic error was not going to work. I called my old friend Dan Gray, the man behind Sidereal Technology, and he said that he would be delighted to come down from Portland and volunteered to put high resolution on-axis encoders on the mount. Dan and I had worked together for many years on direct-drive motors and on-axis encoders, and Dan’s new controller was capable of using measurements from encoders mounted directly on the axis, thus bypassing the problems in the gear train. This would solve the problem of finding the double stars, or so we thought. Russ asked if he could bring an assistant and I said that was fine. On the Saturday night of a star party in the desert, I have always make cedar-planked salmon on the Baja-grill, and in order to size the chunk of salmon, about a week before the run I asked Russ if he was bringing a student. Yes, he said. In fact, he said, he had invited 8 students and expected all of them to join us. Russ is very enthusiastic and sometimes, in his excitement, he forgets the usual courtesies.