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Cheers Paul. It does sound like a fun project that could be written up for a short report in the Journal. Perhaps when I have some spare time, I’ll follow your advice and look into this a bit more.
Maybe the BAA should establish a (very) long-term project where its members follow the movement of the celestial pole.
Here’s another image. As Nick’s image shows, and indeed Robin’s spectrum indicates, the object is very blue. I’ve uploaded a higher quality image to my member’s page.
LOL. Would you ask your weather owl if it can arrange for the fog here to be ‘burned off’, so that I might, this evening, have a look at the dwarf nova in Monoceros that Robin has highlighted. Or does the owl just predict the weather? It faintly reminds me of a favourite character from childhood – the mechanical owl in the 1981 Clash of the Titans, constructed by Hephaestus so that Athena does not have to be parted from her beloved pet.
Hi Robin. Very interesting. Am I right in thinking this would be consistent with an accretion disk in an optically thick state? Or are there other – perhaps more likely – explanations?
I’ve been to York many times. There is the full range of establishments: from eye-gougingly expensive but ineffably cool bars all the way to what might be described by some (more precisely, those southerners who rarely mix with provincials) as dens of iniquity. All said in jest 😉
After quite a bit of frustration, I am now delighted with the performance of the Hyperstar. Good grief though. Centering the corrector plate, ensuring the sec. mirror holder is not tilted with respect to the corrector, rotating the corrector to minimise zonal errors, minutely altering the sensor – Hyperstar distance, altering the tilt of the sensor slightly…… Need I go on.
Sorry, this has nothing to do with Sirius B. It was a big deal though. Please don’t eject me from the thread 😉
You know this of course, but it is also worth saying that the greater altitude that Procyon achieves from our vantage point should help with seeing. I just need to get the Hyperstar off my C8 and put the secondary mirror back for native FL imaging. After all the faff with getting things aligned just right…
For those who are interested and haven’t visually observed or imaged this yet, this transient is still quite bright and nicely placed in Leo Minor for evening obs.
K Itagaki’s latest image on David Bishop’s site puts the SN brightness at around 13.6 (clear filter, presumably V mag zeropoint).
Unfortunately there’s been quite poor weather in NE England recently – with just snatches of clear sky – so I haven’t been able to get at this object.
That’s a quite reasonable comment. Some issues are great, others not. I like Sue French’s deep sky bit, as she highlights stuff that looks good to amateur visual observers who do not have a giant Dobsonian.
Sorry for being a party pooper with the link, Jack. I think you have raised an interesting topic for discussion and I wanted to put here the link to the programme for anyone who is interested.
There are several issues here aren’t there – for example about how one interprets a loose statement like ‘Mars, our nearest neighbour’ that was used on the Sky at Night. Of course, as people have pointed out, ‘which planet can get closest to Earth?’ is a quite different question to ‘which planet is most often the closest to Earth?’, and indeed ‘which planet is closest to Earth now (or indeed any specified time)?’.
Revealingly, Chris Lintott, an accomplished astrophysicist, checked that Mars was closer than Venus at the time of broadcast, but didn’t even think to check the distance to Mercury at that time. I am not saying any of you are guilty of this, but I think we can probably say that many people will just think of the sequence of orbital ellipses around the sun and conclude ‘it must be either Venus or Mars, mustn’t it.’
Also interesting is that (I hope I recall this correctly) the programme researchers looked through articles around this topic and found that there wasn’t anything published on this question. On something so simple, this is very interesting.
P.S. I second Jeremy’s point about More or Less. I subscribe to the podcast. I was hooting with laughter as Tim Harford took a nutritionist to task about the difference between ‘facts’ and what might be ‘good policy’ – relating to data on sugar consumption over time.
Hi Alex – I’m a Geordie ;).
Just a bit of a fun observation. They’ve obviously corrected the figure for the web; here’s the print version. How does this happen? Surely they just use stock maps.
David
Indeed there are different average measures.
If you put all the days of a randomly chosen year in a hat, pull one out, and then have to guess which planet is closest to us on that day: Mercury would be the wisest choice.
Yes, I listened to this section on the BBC’s More or Less
