When a star is occulted by the dark limb of the Moon its apparent intensity drops to zero very quickly. MacMahon (1909) proposed that the time of disappearance would measure the diameter of the star, but Eddington (1909) demonstrated that diffraction effects at the lunar limb would lengthen the apparent time of disappearance to about 20 msec, and suggested that these effects would greatly limit the usefulness of the technique. MacMahon’s paper indicates that he was aware that stellar duplicity could be detected from occultation observations, but he did not amplify the point and Eddington did not comment on it. While it has been demonstrated theoretically by Williams (1939) and experimentally by Whitford (1939) and others that stellar diameters of a few arcmsec can be measured by this technique, its use for the discovery and measurement of double stars has been only incidental to other programs (O’Keefe and Anderson, 1952; Evanset al., 1954). Properly exploited, the method can contribute materially to the study of double stars.
