Named in honor of Paul Couteau, double-star observer at the Observatoire de Nice since 1959, on the occasion of his retirement. Using the large refractors at Lick, Yerkes and Nice, and the telescopes of Almeria and Pic du Midi, he has discovered more than 2700 new binaries, achieving 135,000 individual measurements. Couteau, having measured star separations down to the 60-milliarcsecond resolution limit of the 2-m telescope at Pic du Midi, is one of the sharpest ‘eyes’ on Earth. (M 23137) _ _.