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This might be a completely off-the-wall suggestion but I observe that C-c{l,r}amps are available with a grasp of at least six inches, or 150mm. Almost the first link I found is https://www.yandles.co.uk/tools-machines/clamps-cramps/c604
Not entirely convenient perhaps, but very likely functional.
You reaction is understandable. Clavius is clearly not on the dark side of the moon because I have seen it for myself. Mare Moscoviense is on the dark side of the moon (*)
Anyway, there is no dark side of the moon really. As a matter of fact, it is all dark (+).
* In the same sense as Africa used to be the dark continent.
+ According to Pink Floyd. As the albedo is roughly the same as that of tarmac they make a good case IMO.
00:00 is the first midnight of each day; 12:00 is noon; 24:00 is the second midnight of each day.
00:00, occurring before the sun reaches its highest point the sky (except at the geographic poles), is quite clearly ante meridiem and 24:00 is equally clearly post meridiem.
Yes, I am a pedant. Guilty as charged.
I would recommend doing so in a wavelength which isn’t completely drowned out by man-made pollution …
Although the original data has been withdrawn from its original repository it is still available if you know where to look. If there is any interest I will try to dig it out and let you know where to find it.
I’m trying to find out how Astrometrica estimates the gain, G (e-/ADU)
Ah. The photometry I do, which hardly ever uses Astrometrica, takes the gain as a given constant which I have evaluated for the specific camera which I use.
Just spotted this:
The reason I am doing this is that Astrometrica gets this wrong. In fact it reports two different SNRs in two different places
If by two different places you mean two different positions within the same image, it may not be wrong. As I noted in my earlier response the PSF can be position-dependent. The sky brightness will almost certainly be position-dependent (try measuring LBVs in the Andromeda galaxy!). Anyway, a fainter star (lower signal) will have a lower SNR than a brighter one even if the background is the same.
I am not quite understanding what you mean, in other words. I am but a bear of very little brain.
If you really want to get rid of stars, DAOPHOT does a damn good job in my experience.
The work flow is to identify all the objects, then a set of unsaturated and unblended stars. From the latter you build a model of the point spread function. Note that the PSF may be position-dependent. Fit one or more PSF models to each detected object, removing ones which are “good enough” in some sense as you go. Repeat until you no longer have any “good enough” fits.
Much the same could be said of the usefulness of publishing predicted magnitudes as faint as 15, let alone well below 20.
BAA members can now readily observe things which are significantly fainter than mag. 22.
My dome is controlled by LesveDome and very successfully too.
The major problem, from my POV, is that LesveDome is Windoze only and I want to move to a Linux-based TCS. The only thing stopping me is the lack of an INDI driver for the Velleman K8055 controller board. If anyone knows of one, please let me know.
Steer a (virtual) radio telescope around the sky. Listen to whistlers from Jupiter, the repetitive pock-pock-pock from a pulsar, the loud noise from the sun and the constant faint hiss from the CMB no matter where the receiver is pointed.
Many years ago I observed the sun with a small dish controlled from the visitor centre at Jodrell Bank.
This is going off at a bit of a tangent and might be more suitable for older people in astronomy but we should keep in mind that astronomy is much more than imaging.
Celestial mechanics was traditionally illustrated with orreries.
Mechanical models of solar system objects to scale (either by size or by relative separations) are relatively straightforward to make.
Cerenkov telescopes pick up flashes of light from individual incoming gamma rays. Modern neutrino telescopes pick up individual flashes of light too, and also have an angular resolution of a significant fraction of a radian. (Early ones were omnidirectional and were lucky to pick up one collision per day.) Throwing ping pong balls at an observer, or at a sheet held by the same, would illustrate this effect nicely. Alternatively, a number of “pings” from speakers scattered around a fixed source provides a sonic analogue.
Spatially resolved spectroscopy measurements permit the development of three-dimensional models of external galaxies and the way in which they rotate. C.f. solar system models.
Astrometry from Gaia allows three-dimensional models to be made of our local stellar environment and the motions of the constituent stars. C.f. orreries.
I’m sure that other examples can be given with a little thought.
A few years ago I was given a chocolate teapot as a Xmas present. It worked entirely according to spec.
It was designed to melt when boiling water was added, the liquid then to be used as a fondue-like coating for other edibles such as pieces of fruit, biccies, etc.
Thanks for prompting me to re-visit the S-G algorithm. As a result I found https://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/ADPF/ADPF.pdf
which describes an implementation which automatically optimizes the polynomial order. The window width still needs to be chosen by hand.
Two standard approaches, one lazy and the other more rigorous.
Lazy: guess the width of the signal peaks and set the smoothing window to be around 3 times that. Use degree 2 or 3 polynomials unless the window is very large (over 20 say) when you could choose degree 4 or 5.
Rigorous: Compute residuals for a range of window widths and polynomial degrees. Perform statistical tests on them and choose the filter which best passes your acceptance requirements of high noise to signal ratio (that way round because you are trying to remove all the signal from the noise). The Durbin-Watson statistic, which measures autocorrelatIon at lag 1, is a simple test which tends to work well, but a fuller autocorrelation at a variety of lags might be more appropriate.
Wikipedia has good articles on S-G, D-W and several other tests for signal in the presence of noise. Easy to use implementations are all over the place. I tend to use R as it is free and portable, unlike Matlab and Mathematica.
Fascinating!
Have you tried good old Savitzky-Golay smoothing? It was specifically designed for smoothing (and differentiating) spectra. If so, how does it compare with the wavelet approach?
Here it is: https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/1997ApJ…482..420L/abstract
Hydrogen burning continues in the fully convective body of a low mass white dwarf until the temperature drops below 2000K.
White dwarfs in binary systems very often undergo hydrogen fusion. The BAA-VSS observes them all the time. I admit this is stretching the terminology for “energy output in white dwarfs” but still …
