Excerpt:
Last year saw two interesting events in the world of double stars, both of them connected with an astronomer's old friend in the Big Dipper. While the early history of double star astronomy had to be completely rewritten after an examination of 17th century Italian manuscripts, its future at the beginning of the next millennium was briefly unveiled by the amazing precision of a new astrometric instrument, which will soon eliminate the difference between spectroscopic and visual binaries.