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I was very sorry to hear this news. I met David about 8 or 9 years ago when I went to his home to collect a 16″ Dob which he had built for me. Whenever I use it I think of the superb craftsmanship that went into its construction.
Hi Ian,
Have you tried the AAVSO ? I may be mistaken but I seem to remember that Bert Pablo, the staff astronomer, had some involvement with the development of PHOEBE2.Tony
Hi Kevin,
I Use AstroImajeJ for calibration and photometry. Perhaps you might find this guide helpful :https://britastro.org/2018/a-guide-to-astroimagej-differential-photometry
I don’t use plate solved images for alignment/photometry, I prefer to use apertures (see the “Process” tab and “Align stack using WCS or apertures”). Also I haven’t found it to be good at stacking. It can do it but the stacked file has a FITS header lacking essential data ( eg time !) . This can be dealt with by copying a FITS header from another file. So if I know I’m going to need to stack, I would choose and odd number of images and pick the middle one then copy its FITS header to the stacked image. However the calibration is fairly straightforward I think. Hope this helps !
It might be worth mentioning that there is an active PEP section in the AAVSO led by Tom Calderwood. They specialise in using PEPs to obtain high quality photometry of bright stars which can be difficult targets for conventional photometry with CCD or CMOS cameras. They might be able to advise.
Tony
I agree, its worth checking. I’m using AiJ for processing and as far as I can see it assumes its being given start of observation times in the DATE-OBS field coming from the capture software. I couldn’t find a way of changing that assumption in AiJ so to get the times right I had to edit the output files. If I use SIPS I don’t have to do this. For many this probably doesn’t matter much but I’m timing the minima of eclipsing binaries so if the timings of the observations are wrong, the minima will be wrong too. I can see it’s also important in astrometry.
Hi David,
There is also this page :- http://www.as.up.krakow.pl/add-minima/?p=form
Which suggests a new database is being prepared, perhaps including the times of minima submitted through the database. They are still accepting minima but these now have to be emailed to the address supplied.
Before the list disappeared it seemed to include some very old observations and I am fairly sure that none of the observations I added over the last year or so had been added. In contrast, observations included in the AAVSO journal seem to get included as soon as they are published as far as I can work out. The obvious solution would be to send observations to the AAVSO for inclusion in their Journal as does Graeme Coates (see earlier post) but I would rather have them published in the BAAVSS circular so that it better reflects the activities of UK based variable star observers and that’s why I sent my observations to Des for him to include in the last issue. I would have thought once they realise that ToMs are being published regularly in the Circular they would wish to add them to the database in the same way they do with the AAVSO data.
Hi Graeme,
I have seen an observation of yours in the AAVSO journal. Is there any information you have to supply to Gerry Samolyk in addition to the published information ? I’m planning to try to get mine into the BAAVSS circular if I can. We know what the AAVSO do works so its a good place to start I think.
Tony
James,
The publications include the AAVSO journal and our own BAAVSS journal. I can’t find a way of identifying who the observers are from the Krakow database but I can see observation details including observers, on the Czech website (O-C Gateway). I haven’t so far been able to find any observations on the List of Minima on the Krakow website which also appear on the O- C gateway of the Czech astro society but AAVSO observations published in their December Journal are already on there. In future I think I will do as Jeremy suggests below and go through Des.
Tony
Hi James. I think that is actually the one I mean. I can certainly see observations from you and David Conner listed there ( many more than I have done by the way !) but I wonder why there is a distinction between published and unpublished observations. Do you know if the unpublished ones are actually getting added in to the database ?
Tony
