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The first result of these inquiries was a classed catalogue of 269 double stars presented to the Royal Society in 1782, followed, after three years, by an additional list of 434. Moreover, an important novelty was introduced by the observation of the various colours visible in the star-couples, the singular and vivid contrasts of which were now for the first time described.
When it is added that a few star-couples had been noted in singularly, but it was supposed accidentally, close juxtaposition, and that the failure of repeated attempts to measure stellar parallaxes pointed to distances at least 400,000 times that of the earth from the sun, the picture of sidereal science, when the last quarter of the eighteenth century began, is practically complete.
The displacements caused by parallax were thus in a sense doubled, since the star to which the planet seemed approximated in the northern hemisphere, showed as if slightly removed from it in the southern, and vice versâ. As the planet pursued its course, fresh star-couples came into play, during the weeks that the favourable period lasted. In these determinations, only heliometers were employed.
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