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Very sad news indeed.
He gave a wonderful talk at the Winchester weekend many years ago (Alfred Curtis lecture) when it was held at King Alfreds college. As a modest collector of star atlases, I was enthralled.
Gary
I measured it at the same magnitude 16.738C one minute after you Stewart (mine was the next job after you in the queue).
Gary
I’ve been following this visually and remotely for a while now.
Image below is from last night (June 24.95 UT), and is a truncated image taken with SLOOH Canary 2 Ultra Wide field 85mm Teleview riding on the main telescope.
Unfiltered magnitude 9.4CV using the BAA T CrB sequence.
Gary
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Well done Lars. I wondered if anyone would have a try.
Clear here until dusk, then cloud rolled in just as I was about to open observatory. Typical!
Gary
Cloudy here this evening, but looks like SS Cyg is at mag 10.1V according to latest from AAVSO – so in outburst!
Gary
Well it was certainly a little brighter this morning visually, so the next 24-48 hrs will tell. It’s approached magnitude 11.0 a few times since the April outburst and returned to it’s normal state, so it’s anybodys guess what will happen next.
Gary
North Birmingham treated to a fantastic auroral display this evening.
Photo is a 3 second hand held with iPhone.
Gary
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I have a weather Owl. It’s been mentioned on this forum before, so I won’t post a photo of it again. It remains more successful than the BBC/Met office forecasts.
Gary
Hi Peter,
I don’t have a dedicated meter, but I do have an iPhone app called Dark Sky Meter. Not sure how accurate it is, but the odd time I do take a reading, the results are between 18.8 and 19.2. I take them fairly infrequently, because to be honest I get depressed when I see the result.
I was hoping that one of the good things to come out of the Birmingham City Council debacle would be the dimming of street lights after midnight. It’s been rumoured that it might happen, but knowing the incompetence of all involved, they are probably still looking for the switch! I’m still waiting for that to happen.
Gary
Alan,
I guess as a purely visual observer, I get to use more nights than you do as an imager – but this year has certainly been a disappointment so far.
My weather records for 2024 show that I’ve observed with my 51cm on 28 nights this year (including last night-this morning), with only three of those nights being dusk-dawn. The rest have been clearings and holes. This time last year (May 5) the number was 39 with 11 dusk-dawn nights.
If the weather eroded my enthusiasm for astronomy, then I would have given up a long time ago. It’s hard being an amateur astronomer in this country, and it always has been. So no change there! For me the biggest threat to my enthusiasm is the brightness of the backgound sky, which has deteriorated greatly over the past few years. OK, I live in north Birmingham, and the skies have never been dark, but the introduction of LED lighting has pretty much killed off my fainter then mag 16 detections, whilst the the majority of the time sees me struggling to get to 15.5. As an observer of many faint CV’s, this is the demoralising aspect for me. I won’t give up though. Over the past few years I’ve slowly been altering my observing programme to compensate for the degrading sky quality.
If it comes to a choice between cloudy weather and sky quality, I’ll take the former every time!
I hope your skies start to improve.
Gary
I too am a little mystified by the photometry in the AAVSO database. I went back to the image after I saw it, and double checked I had ID’d the correct star – which I had.
I used the normal wide field image from the Slooh Chile 2 scope for both measures. The ‘Y’ is the AAVSO code for active. The image was measured with AIP4WIN.
Gary
Stewart,
I have two predictions…
MOMO (Multiwavelength Observations and Modelling of OJ287) 2026-2028
Mauri Valtonen – May 30, 2031
Disappointment looms for somebody!
Gary
Winchester weekends have never been streamed live or recorded in the past, so it’s unlikely you’ll get to experience this if you don’t attend – if it ever happens of course! Just maybe though, someone might record it on their phone and post here.
Gary
Why don’t we all try it in the bar on Saturday night? The tune is well know. Sounds like a choral hit to me, rather than a solo.
Gary
That’s very bad luck Mel. Hope you are making a speedy recovery, and can get back to observing VS as soon as possible.
Best wishes,
GaryObserving statistics for 2023.
Gary Poyner (Birmingham)
Didn’t beat my record year of clear skies of 2022, but having said that, not too bad from North Birmingham. The year was pretty evenly spread, with 54% of observable skies occuring in the first half of the year. The last three months of 2023 were pretty disappointing though, with December being awful.
2023 (2022 in parentheses)
Clear nights (less than 50% cloud) 29 (41)
Partially clear nights (50% or more cloud) 101 (103)
Totally cloudy nights 235 (221)
Total observable nights 130 (144) with 57 (74) of these nights having Moonlight interference. I made observations
on 123 nights.Total hours at the telescope 257h (303)
Best month May with 17 nights, 5 clear and 12 partially clear (August – 17)
Worst month December with 3 partially clear nights (November – 8)Weather predictions from various sources gave incorrect information on cloud cover for 71 nights during 2023 (77).
Total visual VS observations for 2023 is 11,043 (12,005). CCD single measures using remote telescopes COAST, SLOOH and the AAVSO MPO-61 are 3,301 (2,996).
Happy New Year
GaryHi Duncan,
Was this a manual entry or upload? It is a bit strange.
For the magnitude, did you enter 8.4 or [8.4?
Gary
