Speckle observations of binary stars

Eighteen other stars previously announced as bright binaries have not been confirmed following numerous attempts to do so, and we show that their apparently spurious nature is likely due to the domination of the speckle transfer function by moderate telescope aberrations under conditions of superb seeing encountered at the CFHT in 1985. After deletion of these spurious systems, this effort has resulted in the discovery of 75 new, bright binaries.

We consider some aspects of the duplicity frequencies among the diverse spectral and luminosity classes represented in this sample. We anticipate that the completion of a speckle survey of the Bright Star Catalogue would lead to the discovery of at least 200 additional binary systems with angular separations mostly below 0.20". Many of these will have periods of the order of one decade and will be accessible to complementary radial velocity programs of enhanced precision.