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Information from John Greaves: For visual observers, this heretofore hidden and unknown Mira, noted by Patrick Wils at the following url, might be of interest: http://wiki.tass-survey.org/tass/view.do?nodeId=Tass&contentId=TassJ214622.2%2B434350 The separation's difficult to assess as the proximity of the two seems to have confused the surveys a bit, as they don't all quite agree and/or don't contain both stars, but they seem to be separated by about 4 or 5 arcsecs, so easily split by most 'scopes when the Mira is brightish to middling. This thing's going to be a yellow and quite red pair, possibly reminiscent of the fine 'straw and garnet' xi Bootis at times, dependent on the Mira's magnitude (xi Boo is a binary that actually lives up to fanciful colour descriptions for once), with the 'secondary' here being even redder than in that case. Possibly a test of skill too. Can visual observers follow this thing down to minium? Or even define whether at maximum the Mira outshines the nonMira? The example plates given are actually far red plates, and in the V case the Mira doesn't get much brighter than the 'primary', it seems, possibly. I'm going to assume it is far too close a pair for the usual photographic and CCD amateur setups (and won't be half as pretty that way either ;) ) All in all something a bit different for the visual observer to play with. Cheers John PS the listed proper motion of the Mira is a bit iffy too, but there is no apparent relative motion evident to the eyeball between POSSI and POSSII. Probably just a coincidental alignment all the same.
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