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I do love a good religious argument, which is why I will jump in feet first.
Like many, I think taxonomy is very important. There is room, IMO, for the taxonomic term “planet”. Think biology, where “genus” has a rather well defined meaning. Biology also has species and sub-species.
In my view the adjectives “terrestrial”, “ice-giant”, “super-earth”, “sub-neptune”, “dwarf”, “binary” and “satellite” are all species or sub-species of planet, as are many others.
Ceres is a dwarf planet. Venus is a terrestrial planet, Ganymede is a dwarf satellite planet, as are Luna and Charon. All are planets.
Planetologists, as opposed to astrophysicists, appear to agree with this taxonomy.
Compare Felis catus and Felis sylvestris, each of which live in the UK. Both are Felids.
Returning to the young members issue: I do not have a solution, far from it, but I am a member of the Cambridge Astronomical Association.
The CAA has a very thriving and active membership, many of whom are youthful by the standards of other local societies, let alone the BAA. They appeal to primary schoolchildren as well as those a very few decades older.
One could do much worse than to contact the CAA committee to see how they manage it. Their website is at https://www.cambridgeastronomicalassociation.com/ and I could provide introductions to a few of their people on (off-forum) request.
My personal view: I’m divided. I became an old age perisher this year but I am virtually certain never to be eligible for honorary membership unless the medics make astounding advances in longevity research. I can see, though, that those members with over 40 years continuous membership might be justifiably aggrieved if recognition of their long service was arbitrarily removed.
On balance, I believe that the best way forward would be to recognize longevity with a physical badge (gold tie pin has been suggested) rather than a financial reward. Honorary membership would continue in name but the subscription model simplified and the Association’s finances improved.
Please see https://britastro.org/observations/observation.php?id=20231213_165900_046f8d7b41dfcd8f
Not as impressive as Nick’s image but the nova had already faded to mag 21 by then.
Thanks Wayne – I saw your latest note on ARPS’ groups.io
As did I. In particular the longer period is now completely ruled out.
Reviewing this thread, I noticed that no-one had spotted the obvious answer to my professionals bugging amateurs quip.
What will likely happen is that everyone will send out to the local hardware shop for a big enough piece of plywood to cover the aperture and then cut a small diameter hole in it.
Nick: sure but as Grant points out, paying for a Windows license costs more than the underlying hardware. Emulation costs a great deal in performance too.
I’m agnostic. I run ARM and 86 architectures. I presently run Linux, Windows, MacOS and Android. In the past I’ve used CP/M, George 3, VME/B, MS-DOS, RSTS/E, RT-11, VAX/VMS, a whole bunch of Unices, and more which don’t spring immediately to mind.
Horses for courses.
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.
