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If you insist on running Windows your options will be limited.
Arm-based single board computers like the Raspberry Pi and the Odroid are very small(only a little bigger than a credit card), take very little power (a few watts) and yet are thoroughly capable of running observatory control software, including schedulers for unattended observations. Even better, essentially all the software required is free.
Sometimes, in my opinion, it is worth going outside one’s comfort zone. An investment of £100 or less will let you explore without breaking the bank.
Shouldn’t it possible to extract useful information from the sky background in the photometrically calibrated images and spectra we take ? If so there could already be a huge (untapped ?) historical source of data covering a range of passbands, locations, air mass and atmospheric conditions
Cheers
RobinThat is a damned good idea! I alone have over 30,000 images neatly catalogued, most of which contain little but stellar images so determining the background sky brightness should be possible.
The FITS headers of mine not only have RA, Dec and time recorded, they also have altitude and azimuth (admittedly easily computed from the first three) so more than just air mass is available – the distribution over the sky, such as city lights, can also be determined. About the only thing I don’t have recorded is the weather condition at the time of exposure but perhaps there are other public records of that too.
I personally don’t but Kevin Hills has a SQM within a few metres of my observatory. I will pass on your questions to him and see what he does with his data. If the answer is nothing, yet, I will try to encourage him to engage with you and the rest of the community.
In the past I have offered to accommodate BAA members who happen to drop by my place in La Palma when I am also in residence. That offer is still open for the time being.
Longer term, I may set up a commercial offering open to anyone at any time of the year.
It’s arguable whether the Canaries are in Europe. Geographically they are closer to Africa and geologically they are on neither the African or Eurasian plates.
I tend to report everything in decimal of the day these days.
I report everything in JD but convert to year/month/decimal day when sending material to The Astronomer because that’s the format preferred there.
The conversion function is really rather cute but I won’t quote it here, unless requested, because the complexity imposed by irregularly long months and years makes for a very baroque looking function.
I really like Aperture Photometry Tool by Russ Laher. Written by a professional photometrist at Palomar it works extremely well, is very flexible and is still being maintained. The author is very open to suggestions for improvement and has implemented a couple of mine. It already has elliptical apertures (useful for photometry of galaxies, etc, or on slightly trailed stars/asteroids) and Russ is considering adding capsule apertures for asteroidal trails. Recently APT has made a start on PSF photometry, which works rather better than aperture photometry in crowded fields.
APT is written in Java and runs on essentially all current operating systems. I can provide assistance and a few useful help-scripts if desired, one of which creates a spreadsheet output which is fully compatible with the BAA-VSS database. I use LibreOffice, so no Excel license required..
Available from https://www.aperturephotometry.org/ and check out the Wikipedia page as well.
I think it means dithering may have become an essential but the saved readout time over a night may balance out the need for more frames.
If the FWHM of the stars is several pixels, poor focus, seeing and minor guiding errors will do much the same as dithering for free.
Many photometrists defocus slightly for exactly this reason.
Thank you all. I am learning a lot of information which will doubtless come in useful one day. Although the SX 814 now used has a CCD chip it seems inevitable that I will need to use a CMOS device sooner or later.
Actually, I have already used CMOS sensors in extremely elderly Canon DSLRs. I have not yet attempted to do photometry at anything better than 100mmg accuracy or precision. 2mmag is possible with the SX camera.
Paul
Not having a CMoS camera to play with, I throw this suggestion out for those who do for them to consider.
Take a series of dark exposures under conditions as equal as possible, especially sensor temperature. Fit a smooth curve to the intensity readings at each pixel. Extrapolate back to zero exposure. That is your bias frame.
Rather tedious but I don’t see why it shouldn’t work. Whether bias frames are useful to you I couldn’t say.
I can’t answer your question authoritatively but will point out that the precision of 10:47.7 and 10:47:42 differ six-fold.
If a calculated value is known only to 0.1 minutes it is often not a good idea to specify it to a precision of 1 second as that would give a false impression as to how well determined is the true value.
Thanks Ian,
Very useful starting point for me.
Some imagers have advised to cool to only zero, but I believe that there is some advantage in going cooler with CMOS cameras, but I’m not sure about this.
Regards
KevinYou should cool to the point where the thermal noise is negligible compared with other sources of noise, such as sky background, Poisson noise, and so on.
Where that point lies depends strongly on the camera and, to some extent, on the sky background. For my present camera (a SX-814 CCD) -10C is easily cold enough and well within the reach of its Peltier cooler except in the very hottest of summer nights. Air temperatures of 25C are not unknown in La Palma and were reached this last summer on a few nights, but they are not common.
It’s easy enough to measure the thermal noise of your camera as a function of temperature. Take some (say) 60 second darks at a variety of temperatures and look at the variance of the pixel values.
Thanks Paul,
How do you calibrate defocussed images? Presumably you have to take all the flat frames at that the same defocus?Not really. All flats are completely out of focus anyway!
That is the whole point of flats: they should have no extrinsic structure whatsoever and all non-uniformity over the flat image arises from sensor sensitivity variation, dust rings, vignetting, etc, and not from anything outside the optical chain.
Richard: I have just checked again. In the text which follows I have replace square brackets with curly brackets and put a space each side of the : characters. This is to defeat any attempt by the forum software here to make my text into hyperlinks.
If one goes to the end of the page https://ukdarkskies.org.uk/dark-sky-places then down at the bottom one finds:
Planispheres (https : //britastro.org/node/12028) have rotating discs that allow you to set the date against the time and display the current night sky. See also https : //www.youtube.com/watch?v=UM8fH_NmtU4
The Youtube link is active and is clickable. The one intended to reach britastro is not clickable, for me anyway. I am using the Firefox browser.
If one examines the HTML source, the clickable version reads
{a href=”https : //www.youtube.com/watch?v=UM8fH_NmtU4″}https : //www.youtube.com/watch?v=UM8fH_NmtU4{/a}
but the other only
Planispheres (https : //britastro.org/node/12028)
There should be {a} {/{a} tags wrapped around the latter.
A small point, but on that website the link https://britastro.org/node/12028 is not active. It is correct but I had to copy and paste it into a browser.
Do you have contacts at the organization which may be able to activate the link? It seems a shame to make life harder for interested parties and to reduce the visibility of the BAA.
I’m in LP for all of February and all of August every year. How many weeks before or after those depends on what I feel like closer to the dates.
Anyone who happens to be in the district is welcome to drop by. Just let me know at least a day in advance …
(Sorry, that this is off-topic but I don’t know where else to make the offer.)
By coincidence I’m on La Palma at the moment.
What a shame. I flew out of La Palma on the 16th. We could have met up at my place and have shown you my observatory if the timing had been more convenient.
I am also on the astrometry.net mailing list and have been following your communications there with interest.
At present I’ve no real use for precision astrometry, using the plate solver only to find stars to within a few arcseconds which is plenty good enough for pointing a telescope and to enable APT to find a VS and its comparison sequence, then to do precision photometry.
On the odd occasion I do need good astrometry I use either Astrometrica, if it can be persuaded to work at all, or the IRAF tools.
