Reply To: Preparing for the eruption of T CrB

Forums Variable Stars Preparing for the eruption of T CrB Reply To: Preparing for the eruption of T CrB

#628891

I’m not familiar with the S30, but as long as the thing also creates a network share “//Seestar/” in your local network (to pickup frames on the fly), whatever I come up with should be useable for the S30 as well.

I think I’m halfway done now. I’ll be using siril_cli for stacking, astap-cli for plate-solving and first-look photometry and topcat/stilts to generate some checkplots.

While I’m testing this solution (we might have some clear nights over here in the next few days…), the script will upload checkplots generated live to

http://bikeman.selfhost.eu/astro/T_CrB-latest.png

Cloud monitor to go with this: http://bikeman.selfhost.eu/astro/allsky-latest.jpg

but as long as the plots title mentions “TESTING” after the creation-date, you obviously should not trust the results. I think the plots are obvious, they list the measured magnitude for T CrB in the center plus the catalog(blue) and measured(black) magnitudes for up to three comparison stars, for sanity checking. If you see less than 4 red blobs (identified stars for the photometric analysis), the results are inherently wonky.

Actually the hardest part is to come up with good quality checks that should prevent that the script triggers an alarm (which would result in some loud alarm sound and my bedroom lights being switched on) just by some cloud passing the field or some such (like: at leats 2 comp stars have to be matched with “reasonable” magnitude and T CrB is either detected as brightened or not included in the photometry output (which I guess could happen if it saturates).

Of course the idea is that several people all over the planet would do this, so combined we would have a real good chance to catch T CrB very early in the erruption.

Stay tuned
CS
HBE