Correcting the Washington Double Star Catalog (WDS)

Return to the front page of Martin Nicholson's Binary and Double Star Projects

Some of the more recent new entries to the Washington Double Star Catalog cannot be said with any degree of certainty to be binary systems and in a number of cases the available evidence points very strongly to the listed pair being a “line of sight” arrangement of no particular astronomical significance.

As an example of the problems this causes - some time after discoveries by Greaves appeared in the Washington Double Star Catalog (WDS) he wrote "Some I've published in the past are only candidates. Some aren't even pairs. About a third seem to be certainly real, a third unconfirmed, ie candidates, and the remaining third totally spurious". Although he has now admitted his mistakes I can see no evidence that anybody has taken the responsibility for removing the incorrect material from Vizier or from the Washington Double Star Catalog.