Visual Double Stars Orbits: computing new and revisiting some known orbits.

This spreadsheet contains all the double stars' orbits calculations of the referenced paper.

Many methods have been devised to compute orbits and they fall into two main categories:geometric approaches and analytic ones. Geometric methods deliver orbital elements less certain but are useful when the length of the arc observed so far is just more or less significant of the entire trajectory to come. More and more often though, analytical methods are being used to kind of automatically compute orbits for double stars having only traveled a small part of their entire orbit. This is undoubtedly due to the widespread availability of computers and of specialized computer programmes enabling the straightforward calculation of orbits out of a set of observations without requiring from the operator a grasp of the binaries that he models finally just in an abstract and distant way. One should remember that Couteau (1978) considered the computation of orbits as a craftsman job for various reasons and Worley (1990) questioned the usefulness of some orbits that appear more like computing efforts than good astronomical sense.This paper will not be a quarrel of the ancients and the moderns, but will remind traditional ways of computing orbits so that it will remain, for those who wish, a rewarding craftsman job of playing with a wire and two pins, keeping a close contact with the specificity of the binaries studied and thereof of the observations made, to first find with their best astronomical sense, the foci of the apparent ellipse. The calculation of the orbits and ephemeris of 13 stars will serve as example, and for eight of them first-time original orbits solutions are proposed, computed by means of the geometrical method confirming its appropriateness and reliability.

This is the same presentation, but the pdf file is bigger as images used are of better resolution.