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Not a silly question at all. It has been recommended on the astronomy.net mailing list, including by the author.
Just don’t store any index files which contain areas of the sky which you will never want to solve. Saves disk space too!
Tim, I use ANSVR on my TCS in La Palma. Most of the time it works extremely well but can be a bit finicky to set up. As chance happens I’m flying out to La Palma later today, in part to get the observatory cleaned of volcanic ash. So – no time to give a considered answer but I will try to help you out in a day or two if you still need assistance.
Alan, I have a USB DVD drive you cound borrow if required, depending on where you live.
I’m back to La Palma on Friday, all being well, so logistics might be a problem but surely a solveable one.
Alternatively, perhaps you could ask someone with a drive to image it onto a USB thumb drive for you and then re-install from there.
P.S. I very much like Stellarium because it can show the positions of even minor satellites of the planets. Perhaps I am weird.
Added in edit
I forgot to mention https://aladin.u-strasbg.fr/AladinLite/ which is my atlas of choice for anything outside the solar system. Searchable, goes down to mag 21 or so, precision astrometry and photometry from Gaia, stars, clusters and fuzzies — what more could a deep sky observer want?
Not forgetting the thousands of extremely large “asteroids” now known to be orbiting other stars.
Long after I became an adult I read that detecting, let alone characterizing, exoplanets was essentially impossible. This view became even more widespread after the debunking of claims of astrometric detection of planets orbiting Barnard’s Star.
These days the ARPS provide data for the BAA Handbook and exoplanetary observation has become, if not routine, then certainly mainstream in the amateur community.
Thanks to the generosity of several members there are now very few gaps in my collection of BAA handbooks. I also have a few which can be provided to anyone interested.
My missing volumes are now 1979, 1985, 2004, 2005, 2007 and everything before 1949.
Available free to good homes are 1964-66, 1968-73, 1977 and 2010.
VSS Circulars from the late 90s may become available if anyone is interested. They need sorting out before I can say yay or nay.
It is a long time since I observed in Bortle 7 skies so I can’t really remember what the sky looked like. What I can say is that in La Palma to me the night sky is very definitely blue for 2 or 3 days either side of full moon and I can’t see anywhere near as many stars with the NE as I can two weeks earlier or later.
Colour perception might be a personal response. I’ve unusually light-sensitive eyes as a consequence of a bad attack of measles when I was a small kid.
Note that I. like many imagers, routinely image objects which are fainter than the sky. Long integration times and background removal software are much more feasible with a CCD than a retina!
I don’t have a SQM either, but I still find the numerical value useful, and for essentially the same reason as you like the NLM.
Both give an indication of when the brightness of a stellar object is comparable to the brightness of the sky when observed with a particular optical train and detector. My eyeball is 100 times (5 mags) less sensitive than my CCD and has a resolution 30 times poorer (circa 1arcmin compared with 2 arcsecond seeing limit), so one resolution element of my eye collects 900 times as many photons as in one of the CCD, another 7.4 magnitudes.
Plugging in the numbers, a NLM of 6.3 corresponds to 6.3+5+7.4 =18.7 sky limit for my scope.
The corresponding instrumental estimate is 21.2 – 2.5 * log (2 * 2* π) magnitudes for the sky, which evaluates to 18.5.
That is a remarkably satisfactory agreement!I support this request and would add another, closely related one.
The Bortle scale, as well as being a simple number, is also a measure of sky brightness in terms of equivalent stellar magnitude per square arcsecond. I can never remember that Bortle 4 is, for example, 20.49–21.69 and invariably have to look it up at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bortle_scale
If the Bortle scale is added, could it be something along the lines of “Bortle 4 = 20.49-21.69 mag/(sq-as)”?
Thanks,
Paul
What a shame.
KK Tel at a declination of -52.3 degrees rises above my physical horizon (or so I believe, as I’m not sure what the physical horizon is any more) but is too far south for the design of the mount which limits me to a declination of -47.5 degrees. V877 Ara at -65.5 is much too far south.
PU CMa is no problem. I already monitor HL CMa.
Even if KK Tel was accessible it would be so low that precision photometry would be exceedingly difficult. The best I could do is pick up and announce an outburst.
Oh well. If you find any others north of -47, please let me know by posting here.
I asked Jonathan McDowell about the value of tracking the Ariane for as long as possible.
He responded that it would be very useful to get as good an orbit as possible so that it can more easily be recovered when it returns to this neck of the woods in 2047.
The astrometry is being co-ordinated by Bill Gray at http://projectpluto.com and I urge anyone here, especially the asteroids people, to follow it as long as possible.
Undoubtedly worth a try but you may have difficulties finding the target without a well-calibrated mount and having suitable comparisons in the FOV might also be hard. It goes without saying that the sky brightness will be so perhaps observing in the red and near-IR (r’, i’, z’, Rc, Ic, etc) might be advisable.
One of my images of a Venus – Neptune conjunction shows a 12th mag field star in a 2 second exposure in i’ — though not bright enough to be measurable, taken just 37 minutes after sunset. Essentially everything on the binocular program should be accessible.
Thanks for a good suggestion, I may try it when back in La Palma.
I will see what I can do, but as Tacande Observatory won’t be back in operation until February at the very earliest it will likely take relatively long duration imaging. Gaia is still within range of my kit (must try for it one day) so JWST shouldn’t be too much of a problem.
Thanks for suggesting this target!
“Maximum on A4” when printed in 3-pt FlySpeck font?
While I agree with your general sentiments, I believe any limit should be a little more precise. Perhaps 1000 words or something like that?
That said, both storage and bandwidth are essentially free these days. A picture is worth a thousand words — well, costs more anyway — and the BAA is quite happy to host many thousands of images. No technical reason to be parsimonious; the judgement should be based purely on aesthetic issues. My opinion, anyway.
