The constellation Aries contains several beautiful doubles, all but one of which are easy for our smallest aperture. The most striking of these is gamma, which is historically interesting as the first double star discovered. The discovery was made by Robert Hooke in 1664 by accident, while he was following the comet of that year with his telescope. He expressed great surprise on noticing that the glass divided the star, and remarked that he had not met with a like instance in all the heavens. His observations could not have been very extensive or very carefully conducted, for there are many double stars much wider than gamma Arietis which Hooke could certainly have separated if he had examined them. The magnitudes of the components of gamma are four and four and a half, or, according to Hall, both four; distance 8.5", p. 180°. A few degrees above gamma, passing by beta, is a wide double lambda, magnitudes five and eight, distance 37", p. 45°, colors white and lilac or violet. Three stars are to be seen in 14: magnitudes five and a half, ten, and nine, distances 83", p. 36°, and 106", p. 278°, colors white, blue, and lilac. The star 30 is a very pretty double, magnitudes six and seven, distance 38.6", p. 273°. Sigma 289 consists of a topaz star combined with a sapphire, magnitudes six and nine, distance 28.5", p. 0°. The fourth-magnitude star 41 has several faint companions. The magnitudes of two of these are eleven and nine, distances 34", p. 203°, and 130", p. 230°. We discover another triple in pi, magnitudes five, eight, and eleven, distances 3.24", p. 122°, and 25", p. 110°. The double mentioned above as being too close for our three-inch glass is epsilon, which, however, can be divided with the four-inch, although the five-inch will serve us better. The magnitudes are five and a half and six, distance 1.26", p. 202°. The star 52 has two companions, one of which is so close that our instruments can not separate it, while the other is too faint to be visible in the light of its brilliant neighbor without the aid of a very powerful telescope.
We are now about to enter one of the most magnificent regions in the sky, which is hardly less attractive to the naked eye than Orion, and which men must have admired from the beginning of their history on the earth, the constellation Taurus (map No. 23). Two groups of stars especially distinguish Taurus, the Hyades and the Pleiades, and both are exceedingly interesting when viewed with the lowest magnifying powers of our telescopes.