NEW BINARY STARS DISCOVERED BY LUNAR OCCULTATIONS .2.

This paper is the second in a series, following the one by Richichi et al. (1994a, hereafter Paper I), reporting discoveries of new binary s tars in the course of routine lunar occultation programs at the TIRGO and Calar Alto observatories, or re-observations of known or suspected binaries where only incomplete information was available. We report o n a total of 15 sources. In the following eight cases, we detected a c ompanion for the first time: SAO 93127, SAO 93195, SAO 95677, SAO 9611 0, SAO 97246, SAO 97258, SAO 183637, AG +15 845. For two stars, SAO 76 131 and SAO 184822, we confirm previous reports of binarity, with our IR measurements complementing existing visual information. In the case of the five stars SAO 93484, SAO 96746, SAO 128467, SAO 157923 (alpha Vir), and SAO 162413, a companion had also been previously observed, but we could not detect it in our observation. Our negative detection in most of these cases provides a constraint on the characteristics of the companion. The projected separations in our positive results rang e from 0.'' 79 to 0.'' 006, and the range of brightness ratios from ap proximate to 1:1 to 1:150. The faintest companion has K approximate to 11. The performance of the lunar occultations technique offers a vali d complement to other more modern methods such as speckle interferomet ry and long baseline interferometry, and in fact many of the stars in our list could not be resolved by previous attempts using these latter techniques. In addition to standard observations by fast photometers, in this paper we include and describe the routine use of an IR array detector to record lunar occultations, which offered significant impro vement in sensitivity.