Sirius, the brightest star in the night sky, is orbited by a much fainter companion, “Sirius B.”  Orbiting its primary every 50-years, Sirius B is the closest example of a “White Dwarf Star.” White Dwarfs are stars that have aged past the Red Giant stage in their evolution and collapsed into a dense object that slowly cools. Although probably the size of the earth, Sirius B contains slightly more mass than our sun. A teaspoon full of the degenerate matter making up Sirius B would weigh over five tons on our earth. Likewise, I would weigh 66-million pounds should I wish to stand upon the surface of Sirius B.

Sirius B can be seen in this image as a tiny white dot just below its brighter companion. While Sirius shines at magnitude -1.67, Sirius B appears as magnitude 8.4 – fainter than Neptune! Moreover, they are currently separated by a tiny 10 arc seconds! To capture both stars. I imaged Sirius with a series of short 250-millisecond exposures. After stacking them, I processed the stack in the same way I tease Jupiter’s innermost moons out of the data.

Unfortunately, the result was a bit boring with no background stars and nothing to show the powerful glare of Sirius.  Therefore, I used a second stack of one-second exposures to show the powerful brightness of Sirius and the background stars.  I struggled with a way to represent both products on the same image, and decided just to inlay the shorter exposure containing the two stars atop the longer, prettier exposure.

As Sirius B progresses in its orbit throughout the upcoming years, its position relative to the background stars should be readily apparent.