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Let me stick my head above the parapet and apologize for not contributing earlier. Fortunately (!) I have been very busy of late.
The reason I was busy last week is that I purchased a house and observatory on La Palma on Wednesday. It has a 0.4m Cassegrain, of excellent optical camera, tip/filt adaptive optics which keeps a star image on a single pixel (the plate scale is 0.75 arcsec/pixel) and a SBIG-8 CCD. I’ve not had chance to use it seriously yet but the previous owner managed 2 millimag photometry. La Palma is famous for having clear skies and superb seeing. Incidentally, Kevin Hills has comparable equipment on the same site and I have been working with him and Phil Charles performing ~2mmag photometry on the optical counterpart of an X-ray black-hole transient.
I’ve been busy all day today attending the Exoplanet-II conference in Cambridge — https://www.exoplanetscience2.org/programme . After only 1 day of presentations (out of 4.5) several indicated that amateurs can do bleeding-edge research on exoplanets. Although most spectroscopy is done with 2-10 metre-class telescopes, professionals often use 0.4 — 0.6m scopes for photometry because it is so much easier to get time on them. One speaker presented results from a 0.2m telescope.
I very much intend to work on exoplanets, whether or not a section is created. Needless to say, I strongly recommend an exoplanet section be created.
“Next thing is to determine the rpm and chop rate….”
If you have access to a sillyscope it is very easy to determine chop rate to an accuracy of a few percent. Shine a laser pointer through the chopper at a photodiode and measure the voltage across the latter.
Andy, arcsecs are indeed a useful size for some objects but so are degrees. For some objects, the milliarcsec and microarcsec are the appropriate measures, especially in astrometry and VLBI radio.
This leads me to the proposal that degrees, millidegrees, microdegrees, nanodegrees, … would be the appropriate way of proceeding. Alternatively, and this I find rather more attractive myself, radians and their SI sub-divisions must be the natural units. You may claim that a radian is a rather large angle but the size of the farad has never seriously worried the electronics engineers who are quite happy working with pF capacitors.
Perhaps. IMAO you should check my assessment. I could well be wrong and have been many times in the past.
It is very likely 2MASS 11112688+5540232 which is indeed quite red. V=12.538, J=11.272 according to Vizier.
An excellent idea in my opinion.
A decent number of exoplanet transits are in range of amateur equipment, as indicated by the continuing acknowledgements by Tabby Boyajian et al. to AAVSO observers. Another example is
which can be found at http://www.tacandeobservatory.com/p/act.html
As noted, it is surely possible for amateurs to discover new exoplanets by the transit method. All you need is dedication, good fortune and to be able to perform photometry to an accuracy of 0.003 magnitudes or better. Despite the attention of the professionals, Kepler has only examined a small fraction of the sky and GAIA makes only a few dozen observations (at best) of any given star.
Disclaimer: I’ve a vested interest in the link given above because there’s a fair chance I’ll be purchasing the Tacande Observatory.
