Displaced red and blue components objects

A procedure was developed to search catalogue entries for such objects, which include M dwarfs paired with white dwarfs or with earlier main-sequence stars, and galaxies with asymmetric colour distributions. Residual differences between red and blue and infrared and blue scanned emulsion images define vectors, which, when appropriately aligned and of sufficient length, signal potential candidates.

Test sample sets were analysed to evaluate the effective discrimination of the technique. Over 91000 USNO-B1.0 catalogue entries at points throughout the celestial sphere were then filtered for acceptable combinations of entry observations and magnitudes and the resulting total of about 17000 entries was winnowed down to a little more than 200 objects of interest. These were screened by visual examination of photo images to a final total of 146 candidates.