Ambience:  Clear, cool, no dew.  I enjoyed the company of a pair of extremely noisy hedgehogs blundering about in the undergrowth, snuffling loudly as they went, with a complete disregard for predators or astronomers.

I immediately detected a very slight elongation / deformity of the diffraction disk x300.  At times, the disk appeared very slightly pear-shaped, with the narrow portion in about PA = 200°.  I tried x360 and even x900, but at the last of these powers the disk was not sharply defined.  I thought the best view was at a magnification of x300.  I can only describe what I saw as an 'abnormality' at the edge of the stellar disk in the PA indicated above.  It was barely perceptible but I repeatedly glimpsed it, forming the definite impression of a tiny degree of elongation in the disk accompanied by a vague fuzziness at the edge in PA = 200° (approximately).  It was this last feature that enables me to say that the PA of the elongation was 200° and not 20°.  Unfortunately, however, there is a possibility of unconscious bias, as I was aware of the approximate PA of the companion before attempting this 'extreme' observation, which is right at the very limit of what the 8 cm Zeiss can achieve.

I could not make out any part of the disk of the fainter companion star, merely glimpsing the 'disturbance' it caused at the edge of the primary's disk.

There are no references to this pair in the classic literature, for the simple reason that it was unknown until Couteau discovered it in 1971.  In his book 'Observing Visual Double Stars', he recommends a "good refractor of 30 cm" to see it well, but the separation of the pair has doubled since then and it may now be resolvable with a 6-inch reflector.  From the late 1960s onward Couteau and Muller discovered thousands of close pairs.  Between 1967 and 1976 their "strike" rate was one new double for every 50 single stars examined.  Since Couteau was observing and measuring pairs at the rate of about eight every hour, scarcely a night can have gone by without the discovery of a new double.  From all this, it seems inevitable that more close binaries remain to be found.  In addition to theta CrB, Couteau also mentions tau Ari, 13 Peg and 39 Com as bright pairs all of which are easily visible now but were not so at the beginning of the 20th century.  He adds: "Amateurs, modestly equipped, could have discovered these stars before the professionals".

Ambience:  Clear, chilly, no dew.  No hedgehogs tonight.