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Will let you know in a few days. Hope to have a play this weekend.
I think I last had a play a year or so back and I did the numpy int16 thing (taking care that the values fit in 65536 bins) and it just wrote out a BITPIX=32. I have a feeling I have to force its hand with BSCALE and BZERO explicitly plus there is some option for in effect, “Don’t mess about with BZERO and BSCALE”. It may be you have to – yourself – make sure the image counts are in the range -32768 to 32767…
If you had code to hand I would be keen to see it.
I recently used VIIRS data taken over the last decade to look at the flux recorded for my area of south Wiltshire and found, as I would expect, massive increases from towns like Amesbury. Looking more generally, even at villages, it appears that these are getting brighter too. The glow from Salisbury is spreading outward.
I tried pointing out to the local lighting officer and my County Councillor that lower colour temperature LEDs were better, as they reduced scattered light in hazy/foggy conditions, but they seemed largely ignorant or believed I was some sort of nut. Plus the manufacturers sell the bluer lights at a lower price.
Consequently, the green areas of the Philips light pollution map in South Wiltshire have extended and blue areas in Witshire, Dorset and Somerset are shrinking.
If you stand in the middle of a roundabout in Wiltshire you will be able to read a newspaper down to the fine print.
I pointed out to a Lighting Engineer that “Guidelines” are only guidelines and not rules. His response was that wouldn’t do him any good if a coroner investigating a road traffic accident asked him why Guidelines were not followed.
Silly thought, is it because the FITS header is rather longer. I think it has to be multiples of 2880 bytes or something. I don’t suppose the author of Vphot could have made the assumption that it was always 2880? Saw that once. But only once and 10 years ago.
I’ve seen FITS format files that were FIT, FITS, FTS and f and lower case variants thereof. Never encountered any that were not processed.
Have once come across software that seemed only equipped for 16 bit data – a histogram of 65536 bins was being used.
Theres some fun for anyone using Python, the Astropy library discourages the writing of 16 bit FITS files and I think it defaults to 32bit.
To see fainter faster and allow a V band filter to be put on the front, thereby supporting photometry.
Alas, work got in the way last night. If Peregrine is 18th I probably won’t get it again until it loops back – if the JPL orbit is updated,,,,
When I imaged it there didn’t seem to be any tumbling.
That may change of course.
If it cannot land, will it stay in this orbit? Is it stable?
This might be worth a read: MNRAS 527, 11521–11538 (2024)
18 fun packed pages… https://academic.oup.com/mnras/article/527/4/11521/7511973
Figure 1 is interesting.
Surely comparing the low dispersion spectrum of Uranus with that of Neptune would seal the discussion pretty well?
Blame it on an excess of pre-Christmas mince pies, but how does the IAU organising an astronomy meeting in a developed country undermine anyone – whether attached to “local” history or not?
Personally, I object to the IAU because one of the reasons it used to justify Pluto not being a planet was that it hadn’t cleared its orbit, but neither has Jupiter. There was no reason Pluto could not reside in the historical list of planets and also as the first Plutino/KBO/TNO.
Have a Cool Yule.
David,
By chance I captured an unfiltered image of Gyulbudaghian’s nebula at roughly the same time as you.
Mine is with an f/4 0.3m Newt, unfiltered and the product of 90x 30sec x2 exposures.
My unfiltered measurement of PV Cep sees it at 16.35, slightly down from a few weeks ago.
Have you considered redoing the analysis you did for your paper a few years back? The much longer duration dataset would make it interesting.
Attachments:
For years we have had the problem that amateur astronomy appears to appeal only to youngsters and older people.
Given that 20-40 is around the age when people are (variously) partying, getting married, having kids and building careers, its hardly a surprise we don’t see many of them. Throw in the fact that mortgages knacker the disposable income and that many young people make the mistake of thinking youtube is the font of all wisdom and its amazing that we get any members in that age range at all.
I’m wondering, is there a chance the demographic time bomb may actually see a growth in our membership numbers? Obviously, a new series of Moon landings wouldn’t hurt 🙂
Fair enough – just assumed you would have some overall purpose in mind.
I must admit, like Martin, I remembered PM’s membership of the IUAA – I think it used to appear in the potted bio in some of his books.
I agree with Nick here.
Surely, we should honour achievement and contribution to the field/society, rather than merely being interested in astronomy and remembering (and being able to afford) to pay your subs every year. The existing Awards cover a lot of the individual achievement and contribution – could the frequency of some of those be increased?
Perhaps, those who have made and submitted observations over many years, or laboured long in support of a section or society business could be conferred with some sort of new Award. I would suggest Fellowship status, but that might be seen as divisive in today’s society and opening a can of worms.
Personally, I don’t feel I need recognition for remaining interested in astronomy for 50 years, the experience itself: the views of eclipses, comets, meteors, aurora, planets, the SL9 impacts and simple joy of being out at night under a star strewn sky, has been reward enough. Doing astronomy is fun.
