advantages; knowledge of the discoverer often provides an indication whether a pair will
likely be close or wide, bright or faint, visible mainly in the infrared, have a small or large
magnitude dierence.  From a cataloging point of view, the main advantage of doing away
with discovery designations is that it eliminates people \stamp collecting" new pairs.  It
is a waste of our time to catalog large numbers of new optical doubles which only serve
to appease someone's vanity.
The plethora of all-sky astrometric catalogs and the computer acumen of users has
exacerbated the issue of which pairs to add to the WDS. Formerly,  a pair would auto-
matically be added when its components fell within some angular separation limit, such
as 10
00
.  We now encourage users to only measure (or data mine) pairs which have some
indication  of  physicality.   An  example  of  this  would  be  our  recent  mining  of  the  nal
UCAC catalog (
2013AJ....146...76H
). Of the more than 113 million entries in UCAC4,
and despite the many close pairings we only added the 4082 pairs we determined to be
likely physical.
Finally, it is possible that Gaia (or later Gaia data-miners) may identify large numbers
of  pairs  that  are  preferentially  optical.   In  order  to  address  this  we  could  construct  a
\Faint Object Supplement" to the WDS. Only those Gaia pairs subsequently identied
as physical could then potentially \graduate" to the WDS.
We welcome any and all suggestions to improve the double star database for the user.
Changes will, and should be, deliberate.  However, if the user needs them to make a better
product for the community we will strive to make those changes.
Brian D. Mason and William I. Hartkopf
U.S. Naval Observatory
REN

E MANT

E (1922-2014)
Rene Mante was born in Toulon on September 9, 1922 and passed away on June 14,
2014 in Marsella.  After completing High School, Rene Mante studied at the University
of Montpellier and became a Chemical Engineer.  He worked in the Pennaroya Chemical
Society.  Later,  he searched for work in Marsella and enrolled in courses of Electronics
and Computer Science.  For several years,  he worked in a company that manufactured
tartaric acid until it closed.  At that point, he and some friends established a laboratory
that analyzed food and chemical products.  He retired in 1987 and dedicated himself to
Astronomy, a eld about which he was very passionate.  After having used a refractor tele-
scope, Mante ordered a re
ector from a manufacturer in Trans-en-Provence (Department
of Vart) but that company committed an error in the focal longitude and then went out
of business.  R. Mante, an amateur astronomer, was disappointed but he persevered and
bought a second, and then a third telescope.  His great love for Mathematics served him
in his training that was necessary to carry out calculations associated with double stars.
He presented his research at numerous meetings of the Double Star Commission of the
Astronomical Society of France.  Between 1998 and 2006, Mante published 49 preliminary
orbits for visual double stars:  four in the journal, Observations et Travaux, and forty-ve
in the Information Circulars of Commission 26 (Double and Multiple Stars) of the IAU.
5
In 2005,  along with D. Bonneau,  he published an article in the journal,  L'Astronomie,
entitled
\Dans la chaleur des forges de Vulcain :  le systme multiple omicron Andromede"
.
A cerebro-vascular accident and a fracture of the femur sadly ended his activities as an
astronomer.
Edgar Soulie and Suzanne Mante