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[Jeremy Shears]

Invitation to Brad Schaefer’s Zoom talk on August 17th regarding the predicted eruption of T CrB

I am sharing this invitation from Edwin Aguirre about this Zoom talk on August 17 (Saturday) at 1:30 p.m. UTC (14.30 BST)
It will be interesting to hear his prediction for the time of the eruption.

Jeremy

I would like to invite you and the BAA members to Brad Schaefer’s Zoom talk on August 17 (Saturday) at 9:30 a.m. EDT (1:30 p.m. UTC) regarding the anticipated eruption of T Coronae Borealis. The talk is free and open to the public.

Attached are the details of Brad’s online talk. In addition to Zoom, the event will be streamed on Facebook Live and recorded for YouTube viewers.

NOTE: Everyone needs to register first in order to get the Zoom link for the webinar. You can either scan the QR code on the attached announcement with your cellphone or go directly to the Zoom registration page:

https://us02web.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_Bm_NLfhkSQyG0Es31OYkqg#/registration

Brad’s talk is part of the “Astronomy Experts Speaker Series” that Imelda and I started two years ago in collaboration with the Astronomical League of the Philippines. As you know, the Philippines is a relatively small developing country in Southeast Asia, and many people there cannot afford to travel overseas to attend astronomy seminars and conferences.

So, our goal is to help raise public science literacy and awareness in the country by inviting renowned scientists, researchers and science communicators to share their knowledge and expertise online with the Filipino people through our Zoom webinar series. It is all part of our international astronomy educational outreach efforts.

To date, our guest speakers have included:
Prof. Jay Pasachoff (Williams College), who talked about his 2021 Antarctic solar eclipse expedition
Zolt Levay (STScI), who discussed the Hubble Space Telescope’s most iconic images
Dave Eicher (Astronomy magazine editor-in-chief), who spoke about galaxies and galaxy classification
Fred Espenak (Mr. Eclipse), who talked about predicting and chasing total solar eclipses
J. Kelly Beatty (Sky & Telescope magazine senior editor), who spoke about the fight against light pollution
David Levy on how he and the Shoemakers discovered Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9
Heidi Hammel (AURA vice president for science), who spoke about the James Webb Space Telescope’s latest findings
Dan Green (CBAT director), who discussed the nature of comets
Debbie Elmegreen (IAU president), who talked about galaxies at the dawn of the Universe
Father Chris Corbally, S.J. (Vatican Observatory/Steward Observatory), who explained the mystery of “The Star of Bethlehem”
Brother Robert Macke, S.J. (Curator of the Vatican Observatory’s meteorite collection at Castel Gandolfo, Italy), who talked about meteorites, asteroid 101955 Bennu, and the OSIRIS-REx mission
Brother Guy Consolmagno, S.J. (Vatican Observatory director), who talked about Vesta and the Dawn mission
Valentin M. Pillet (National Solar Observatory director), who discussed the solar corona and the current Solar Cycle 25
Mike Brown (Caltech), who talked about Pluto and the search for Planet Nine
Robert Nemiroff (Michigan Tech), co-founder and editor of NASA’s Astronomy Picture of the Day (APOD)
Jonathan McDowell (Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics), who spoke about the Chandra X-ray Observatory and the invisible Universe.
For fall/winter, we plan to have Meg Urry (Yale University), who will talk about the supermassive black hole lurking at the center of the Milky Way, and Michael S. Kelley, program scientist for the Planetary Defense Coordination Office at NASA Headquarters, who will discuss the impact threat posed by NEOs, and for next year, NASA astronaut Don Pettit, who will talk about astrophotography from the International Space Station. We are currently finalizing the schedules for their respective webinars.

We hope you can join us for Brad’s talk on the 17th!

Best regards,

Edwin

• This reply was modified 2 years, 2 months ago by Jeremy Shears.

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[Gary Drouin]

Greetings, I’m a new member and have tried to
join the section online. The contact the director doesn’t seem to work. Just hangs after hitting the submit button.
Can you help please.
Cheers,
Gary Drouin
207291

[Bill Barton]

Historical Section News 29 has just been published. If you are not on our distribution list, but would like to receive section publications then please contact us to join.

Free booking has also opened for our 2024 Section Meeting. See future events for details.

Mike Frost & Bill Barton.

[Dr Paul Leyland]

Everyone else would need ear protection if I were to join in.

Only dogs like my singing; they howl along with me.

[Jeremy Shears]

I, too, am not far off my 50th anniversary. Whilst it might have been nice to have a free membership, it does seem odd in this day and age that I should pay nothing, yet people just joining would pay the full rate. It seems neither fair nor necessary. This is especially the case considering the financial deficit that the Association has been running for many years (fortunately counteracted by the benevolence of former members who have left legacies).

The BAA has been a central and constant theme of my life. I’d like to think that if you cut me in half you would read the Association’s name running though me like a stick of rock. That for me is the honour.

I actually applied for membership at Christmas 1973 (where did those 50 years go?) and was elected in early 1974. However, I was an impecunious schoolboy so had to drop out for a couple of years, rejoining in 1978. So that is when my continuous membership starts. We should indeed be making it more affordable for young people to join. In fact I wrote to the President at the time to suggestion a lower rate for young people, but it was many years before it came to pass. Which is why I proposed a motion at the 2023 SGM, seconded by Nick James, not to increase the young person’s membership rate (as reported in the current Journal).

By all means bring the motion to continue Honorary Memberships – and thanks for starting such an engaging debate – but I won’t be supporting it. But I would support Gary’s proposal for free Horlicks at meetings!

• This reply was modified 2 years, 10 months ago by Jeremy Shears.
• This reply was modified 2 years, 10 months ago by Jeremy Shears.

[David Arditti]

I’ll try to answer this.

We are proposing removing affiliated societies as a category of membership. Thereafter they will not pay anything to the BAA, and will not receive the publications. However, we anticipate that many societies will still wish to be affiliated because they wish to be associated with the name of the BAA, and will view it as a mark of their standing or credibility. Council would only approve the affiliation of properly-constituted societies.

The members of affiliated societies would still be welcome at BAA meetings. For meetings where there is a ticket fee, it is possible we could continue to offer lower prices to affiliated society members than to the general public, but that will be decided on a case-by-case basis. We’d be free to offer other benefits to them not yet decided. I hope we would give affiliated societies publicity on our website and in the Journal. I think Section Directors would still be happy to give advice to members of affiliated societies (though speaking as Director of the E&T Section, it is my policy to give more time to people whom I know have subscribed to the BAA individually).

What Bill says about the Journal distributed through a local society is interesting. Most societies I know have abandoned maintaining a lending library, and, if affiliated, they don’t really know what to do with the Journal and Handbook, they are typically just kept by the Secretary. It would of course be possible for an official of the society to join in his or her own name, get refunded by the society, and donate the publications to the society – which is the same as happens now, but using different words.

David Arditti
President

• This reply was modified 2 years, 10 months ago by David Arditti.

[Dr Paul Leyland]

It is that time of year again. A recurrent nova in M31 is due to go off again. This one has by far the shortest recurrence period known at about 1 year. I have been looking out for it for quite a while but it has never shown up when I am in La Palma. If you subscribe to 12a_Monitoring@googlegroups.com you will have seen the material below. If not, and you can image down to mag 18 or so in a reasonable time (meaning you have a 20cm telescope or larger) please consider subscribing. My http://www.astropalma.com/Projects/VS/M31N_2008-12a.html provides more information and a link to a finder chart.

Thanks, Paul

Dear colleagues,

Another year ticked off (almost)! As always, I hope you are all keeping well at this time!

Traditionally, this is an e-mail I’ve send around the start of September – this year, I am purposely sending it later as we are working toward a smaller potential eruption window. I know many of you have already been observing 12a regularly – so thanks for that!

This email is to let you all know that, yet again, we have officially restarted our ground-based optical monitoring of the remarkable M31 recurrent nova M31N 2008-12a with the aim to detect the 2023 eruption. As always, I want to extend our thanks to those of you who have already been observing over the last weeks and I want to encourage everyone to join the monitoring effort once again.

We have again secured several very early time spectroscopic observations of the 2023 eruption that require early notification of the 2023 eruption for triggering. This again includes time on the Liverpool Telescope. Our aim with these follow-up observations remains to probe the early-time physics that drive the eruption and an attempt to definitively determine the ultimate fate of M31N 2008-12a – whether one day it will explode as a Type Ia supernova or collapse to a neutron star. Your continued involvement in this project is key to all these aims! Each year we manage to get on target faster and faster, we are hoping that the heavens (and weather) align this year to start our follow-up observations within an hour of the eruption occurring – it’s ambitious, but in theory we can do it!

Last year, although we had an early detection of the eruption of 12a (https://www.astronomerstelegram.org/?read=15786) and rapid spectroscopic follow-up (https://www.astronomerstelegram.org/?read=15788), unfortunately, the geography at the time of eruption meant that we discovered the event just too late to meet the early spectroscopic goals. The LT is setup to automatically trigger spectroscopic observations of 12a as soon as we receive a report of an eruption – stopping any on-going observations at the time, we have ‘ultimate priority’ for these observations! Indeed, we have automated the whole process should the LT be the first telescope to detect the 2023 eruption!

As in previous years, below I outline in detail the monitoring and reporting structure, as well as the notifications in case of a discovery. This strategy is the same as recent years. Please follow the precise instructions because, for instance, some of us have set up email alerts based on the email subject of the discovery notification.

In previous years, the Liverpool Telescope has been a regular source of additional eruption monitoring observations but has only been the first telescope to detect three of the fifteen consecutive eruptions (2014, 2018, and 2020). Out of interest, of those 15 eruptions 8 have been detected by members of this group (the other 7 by facilities such as PTF, LT, and LCO)!

We will still be using the mailing list 12a_Monitoring@googlegroups.com for the communication within the collaboration. The finding chart and reference stars remain the same as for the previous eruption. If you have any questions don’t hesitate to contact me at M.J.Darnley@ljmu.ac.uk and I will provide clarification. Please note that the “12a” mailing list is reserved for discussions about this nova.

I hope that all of you will join again for another exciting season of watching the most remarkable nova go into eruption. Please let me know in case you will not be able to participate in this year’s campaign.

Best regards and clear skies,

Matt for the 12a Collaboration

1) The eruption date prediction

Based on an updated analysis, we expect the 2023 eruption of 12a will take place in December 2023, with the window possibly extending into early January 2024.

2) Who is coordinating

Mike Healy (M.W.Healy@ljmu.ac.uk) and I (M.J.Darnley@ljmu.ac.uk) will be coordinating the observations, but also involved and very interested will be: Allen Shafter (awshafter@gmail.com).

3) Communication strategy

For the communication within the collaboration we will use exclusively the mailing list 12a_Monitoring@googlegroups.com. The usage of the list should be restricted to notifications of (potential) discoveries, status updates from the coordinators, requests for confirmation, and urgent queries. This will reduce the email traffic for all of us. In case of non-urgent/minor questions or updates please contact me (M.J.Darnley@ljmu.ac.uk) directly.

4) Where to report upper limits and photometry?

We encourage all of you to report your upper limits to the AAVSO database, whether you are an AAVSO member or not. We have established the AAVSO database as central data collection hub for this project. We will be checking your reported upper limits frequently. Here is information on how to submit data to the AAVSO, courtesy of (former) AAVSO director Stella Kafka:

Information on how to get an AAVSO observer code and submit your data directly to the AAVSO database: To do so, you need to create an account here: https://www.aavso.org/join-aavso(under “Click Here to Join the AAVSO”).

Once you register, please request an observer code.

Please note that you don’t need to be members to get an observer code and submit data (although it would be great if everyone becomes an AAVSO member and supports the association). Observer codes are unique and help us give credit to observers who acquire observations and diagnose problems with discrepant data when needed.

In case of further questions about the AAVSO data base please contact me (M.J.Darnley@ljmu.ac.uk) or the AAVSO directly.

5) What do we need for a discovery?

To discover the eruption and notify the collaboration, you only need a reliable detection. Ideally, the nova should be clearly detected in more than one exposure. Photometry is useful, but can be done later, because we need to react fast. We are relying on your expertise and judgement about whether a detection is real. If in doubt, follow point 7 below.

Please find attached a finding chart of the nova. The finder chart image is an exceptionally deep exposure taken by the 2m Liverpool Telescope through a Sloan r’ filter, the median seeing of the 21 images combined here was around 1 arcsecond.

6) Discovery notification

If you are successful in discovering the eruption, please notify the collaboration immediately through the mailing list: 12a_Monitoring@googlegroups.com

This should be the first thing you do. CBAT entries or ATels can wait until after this (short) email. Remember that the nova is evolving fast and that we need to be very quick (particularly in triggering the follow-up observations).

Here is a template for the discovery notification. Please attach a discovery image for your stacked data and for at least 2 individual exposures. Ideally, we need a .fits file but if it speeds up the notification then a .jpg screenshot is fine.

If you can immediately provide photometry, then please do so. Otherwise send this email without photometry but start working on the photometry after sending. We will get back to you very quickly.

——————————————–

subject:

——–

M31N 2008-12a – 2023 eruption discovered!

text:

——–

Dear colleagues,

The 2023 eruption has been discovered. Please try to increase your observing cadence to monitor the light curve.

The nova was discovered on <date and time> with a magnitude of <mag> at the <observatory>. Discovery images are attached.

——————————————-

7) If you are not sure

If you are not sure whether you have discovered the nova, please contact the mailing list (12a_Monitoring@googlegroups.com) to request a confirmation. Attach your discovery image(s) and include (preliminary) photometry as well as the location of your observatory.

This scenario is meant for low signal/noise detections at the nova position. If in doubt, please send this email. We’d rather have a few false positives then missing the early stages of an eruption.
——————————————-

subject:

———

M31N 2008-12a – possible 2023 detection; requesting confirmation

text:

———

Dear colleagues,

I found a possible detection of the nova on <date and time> with a magnitude of about <mag> at the <observatory>. Discovery images are attached. Please try to confirm this detection.

——————————————-

8) Announcement and publication

The aim is to announce the discovery in an ATel as soon as possible. All photometry will also be included in a comprehensive publication in a refereed journal.

If you discover the eruption, and after notifying the collaboration, you can publish the ATel yourself or send your discovery information to the following people, one of which will publish the ATel as quickly as possible:

M.J.Darnley@ljmu.ac.uk

M.W.Healy@ljmu.ac.uk

awshafter@gmail.com

If you choose to send the ATel yourself, below is a template that you can use (including some html code in the first paragraph that you can just copy and paste). See also the ATel on the 2017—2021 eruptions:

http://www.astronomerstelegram.org/?read=11116

http://www.astronomerstelegram.org/?read=12177

http://www.astronomerstelegram.org/?read=13269

http://www.astronomerstelegram.org/?read=14130

https://www.astronomerstelegram.org/?read=15034

[Steve Holmes]

The possibility of me joining the Council in order to foster further debate on the matter has been suggested before but I am inherently against “single issue” candidates. One should wish to join the Council in order to further the development of the Association, not just to argue a specific point.

Yes, I would entirely agree that the issue is likely to be low down on anyone’s priority list (including mine!) but I do wonder whether the current system, with its tendency to generate pointless ballots, is in some way responsible for the low voting numbers. Some (such as myself) may not vote at all because they realise that parts of the election are un-necessary anyway and others might be put off by the way that the elections for Council members and Trustees interact, with the additional complication caused by elections whose outcome is a foregone conclusion only adding to the confusion.

And while the issue might be low-priority, surely it is such a simple thing to understand and correct that it should not need a Parliamentary Enquiry to quickly resolve?

[Dawson]

Steve, the obvious answer is for you to join the Council, debate the matter, and convince everyone else to vote a different way.

I can see you are annoyed by this, but I suspect it is VERY low down anyone else’s priority list.

James

[Andy Wilson]

Hi Patrick,
We don’t have a way to offer gift subscriptions via the online form. However, if you contact the BAA Office at the below link they can probably help you with this.
The problem is the membership is linked to the email address used to join. That means we cannot easily do this as a future dated surprise. As soon as the Office create the membership, the person will receive the welcome email. That is also why they cannot be easily done online, as you create a membership associated with the email address you use to create the account when you join.
https://britastro.org/home/about-us/contact-us
Best wishes,
Andy

[Maxim Usatov]

This looks really nice and like you guys had a great time. I wish I could join.

Max

[Andy Wilson]

Hi Michael,
You can see the prices for the different types of membership at this link:
https://britastro.org/join
The rate that would apply to you would be Ordinary Digital, £32.50.
To alter your membership type you can call (0207 734 4145 10am-4pm Mon-Fri) or email (office@britastro.org) the Office. They can update your renewal membership type, or you can renew to the new type over the phone. If they update your renewal membership type, then when you press the renew button in Sheep you will see your new membership type and price.
Best wishes,
Andy

[Nick James]

We are now only two weeks away from the Comet Section meeting at the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich. It looks as if there will be no train strikes that weekend and spaces are still available so, if you haven’t already registered, now is the time to do so! Full details of the event can be found at:

https://britastro.org/event/comet-section-meeting-3

The nearest station to the venue is Cutty Sark which is on the DLR. From here it is only a few minutes’ walk to the museum with entry through the gates on Romney Road. There is also a bus stop right outside the museum for services 129, 177, 188, 286, 386 and N1. The grounds around the museum will open as normal at 7am but the doors will not open until 9am. We need to be out of the museum by 6pm. Please bring your Ticket Tailor booking with you so that we can check you off at the door. If you are early there are plenty of excellent places to buy coffee or breakfast between the station and the park.

The meeting starts with an introduction in the Lecture Theatre at 9:30am followed by a walk up the hill for the special comet-themed planetarium show which will start just after 10am. If you arrive late you can meet us at the planetarium around 09:45 or join when the meeting proper starts back at the Lecture Theatre at 11am. There will be FAS and BAA representatives at the museum entrance, in the lecture theatre and at the planetarium to welcome you.

We have a lunch break scheduled from 12:45 – 13:45. No lunch is provided so bring your own and eat it in beautiful Greenwich Park (sunny weather not guaranteed). You can also get lunch from the cafe at the museum although this is likely to be very busy and we only have an hour. There are plenty of great pubs in the area but getting lunch offsite would be very challenging given the timings. I suggest you don’t try and reserve any pub visits until after the meeting!

All of the talks will be recorded and we will put them online after the event. The meeting schedule is quite tight but there will be an opportunity to ask questions and some time for discussion at the end of the meeting. This is a great opportunity to meet fellow comet enthusiasts face-to-face.

My thanks to Flamsteed Astronomy Society and the NMM for making this meeting possible and to the BAA for support with administration and finances. We currently have over 80 people booked and I’m looking forward to seeing many of you there.

[Ken Whight]

I agree with you Richard, thank you Paul and Paul for your replies, I just have to try and fully understand them now!

I had an enjoyable career working for Philips Research from 1973 to 2008, mainly in silicon device physics (to 1993) during the time when computing power was rapidly expanding. However, I have always had an interest in the more exotic fields of Cosmology and Quantum/Particle Physics and over the years have tried to
improve my knowledge in these areas. So now that I have completed my stellar spectroscopy project (BAA Forum topic “Spectral Line Modelling – please would somebody review the work) I think my winter project will be to try once again to improve my cosmological knowledge.

In the past I have tried to work my way through quite a few books on GR (getting a little further each time) more recently I have worked through the “Theoretical Minimum” books by Lenoard Susskind and got to chapter 10 (before running out of steam!) of “Quantum Field Theory for the gifted amateur” by Tom Lancaster & Stephen j. Blundell, I have also bought “Covariant Physics” by Moataz H. Emam. It’s difficult working alone so would anybody like to join me in studying these books? Are there better books?

One last comment on this topic and I appologise if it sounds a bit mystical, but I don’t think we will get a “theory of everything” until we can fit “free will” or at least the illusion of free will into the picture something that I thought might be possible with my suggestion of a variable Planck “Constant”.

[Mark Phillips]

There’s a conversation on the ASTAP forum about adding a circle / ellipse and how to measure the sky background. Perhaps others who know more about comet photometry than me (most people!) could advise and join?
https://sourceforge.net/p/astap-program/discussion/suggestions/thread/b1c1be085c/
Han has added the option to measure inside a circle / ellipse now in the development version (right mouse drag while holding down the Ctrl key).
Thanks
Mark

[Dr Paul Leyland]

Over the last few years I have been imaging asteroids named for people I follow Twitter and then tweeting the results.

I encourage others to join me in imaging asteroids named after (ex-)BAA members who have been likewise honoured. Over time we should be able to complete a comprehensive gallery.

If anyone is at least remotely interested I could add the ones already taken to my personal gallery.

[Steve Holmes]

And hello to Duncan again!

I didn’t have my BAA Handbook at hand when typing my previous replies last last night but now I have I can perhaps shed some light on the eclipse diagram to which you refer.

Diagrams such as these are taken from the NASA eclipses website rather than being generated by the BAA, and there is an explanatory page about them at https://eclipse.gsfc.nasa.gov/SEplot/SEplotkey.html which might help you. It is, unfortunately, worded in very technical terms but the last part should help you understand the various numbers and times around the map. But basically the blue lines are lines of equal eclipse magnitude and the green lines join places where maximum eclipse for that place occurs at the same time. A larger and clearer version of the magnitude/time plot for the UK appears on page 273 of the current version of the Journal, where the text clearly says that the numbers are magnitudes rather than obscurations.

Hope that helps!

[Andy Wilson]

This is the last chance to register for the Exoplanets Online Workshop. Registration closes on Eventbrite at 10am this morning (Saturday 12th November).

https://baa-exoplanets-2022.eventbrite.co.uk

Registration is required as we are holding this as a Zoom meeting, where attendees can talk or share their screen, so we will not be making the Zoom join link public.

Andy

• This reply was modified 3 years, 11 months ago by Andy Wilson.
• This reply was modified 3 years, 11 months ago by Andy Wilson.

[Dr Paul Leyland]

Many of you know that I have been imaging small planetary satellites of the gas and ice giants. My stamp collection is now almost full in that the remaining ones are below magnitude 22.0 at best. Some of you may be aware of https://britastro.org/section_information_/deep-sky-section-overview/observing-programmes/globular-clusters/the-gc-marathons-part-i-galactic-globular-clusters which I wrote a couple of years back. Unfortunately, a couple of links there were broken when the BAA site was updated but http://www.astropalma.com/Projects/GC_Marathon.html still works.

Accordingly, I have now started imaging GCs and will eventually put them in the BAA gallery and my personal web pages. I have only managed 14 out of 158 so far but hope to pick up a few more in the next week while Sgr et al. are still visible. At least twenty are too far south for a telescope in La Palma and a few more are visible only in the IR. To summarize: only 10% have so far been done.

I urge others to join in this escapade.

[Trevor Emmett]

Hi Denis,

Thanks for this. Very interesting.

I have a personal interest insofar as I was a Geology PhD student in Newcastle 1976-1979 and my supervisor was the late Dr M. Hugh Battey. I seem to recall that he was one a select few who used the telescope for their own devices – he frequently invited me to join him in observations but, alas, I never was able to. This failure I have always regretted.

I believe the observatory was located at the Closehouse Estate to the west of Newcastle – at the time this was the University’s main sports centre and I often played football there. I believe the University sold off Closehouse some years ago. I always wondered what happened to the observatory/telescopes. A few years ago at a BAA meeting in Newcastle I was told that the observatories were no more and that the telescopes were in store (= lost). Believing this, I felt the University had committed a gross act barbarity.

Closehouse is now, I think, some sort of luxury hotel. It was suggested to me that the hotel now owned what was left of the observatory but my informant was not sure. I haven’t been able to find much information about it.

Are we talking about the same place? Or has my age-addled memory failed (again)?

I would be very keen to see these items at least preserved if not restored. I would help as much as I can, but I fear this would be not much in a practical sense.

Best Wishes,

Trevor