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We should do a correction. Simply everything is wrong. The picture doesn’t look like an artist’s impression to me, it looks like an image of another comet; the comet is very very dim (one 2019 obs on COBS ~ mag 17, and perhaps unreliable); the time of best visibility is not 21:15 BST (02:45 BST, 36deg alt due east in astro darkness for me). Where is this information from??????
Yes. I usually use Polaris as my first alignment star as it – very obligingly – drifts only very slowly without sidereal tracking engaged. Plus, as Polaris is a double star, one can straightaway suss out the optical performance of the telescope and atmospheric conditions too before completing alignment and engaging tracking.
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…
