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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.
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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.
While a Committee member of a local society I well recall a keen amateur I knew who fell on hard times and had to sell his telescope and give up luxuries, including membership of our society, to help make ends meet. Its a common thing – jobs are insecure these days.
I always thought it odd that we insisted on 50 continuous years rather than 50years in total – but there I must declare an interest, as astronomy did drop out of my priorities when prog rock, girls and beer entered my life in the mid 70s. I cannot say I regret it though…
As an aside, given the resources consumed and the mailing costs, should we not be encouraging members to move to a Digital model?
I have some images I took a few weeks back as a test. I could take some more if the weather clears. Do you want FITS (after dark/flat) or precalculated mags?
Also, are unfiltered observations okay with you? I assume if I took images on multiple occasions you could derive an instrumental offset? I’m currently using in field stars to derive a Gaia g Zp for each frame and employing tha -though theres a twist to that as I don’t use reference stars that are highly red or highly blue.
Yeah, When I plate solve images I run a Python script under Windows that does all the image processing and file handling which then kicks off a Linux session under the MS WSL Linux environment on the same machine. That runs astrometry.net and then hands back the results. Works really well – but took an evening or two to work out how to do the hand over (and it changed during the last year when WSL2 was updated).
The only reason I don’t run Windows on an RPi5 is because I would then need to buy a £100+ W11 Pro licence and suddenly quite a lot of the cost case has gone away. Certainly I would like to but I have heard that setting up Windows on an RPi was a bit hard going.
Over the years I’ve used DOS, CPM, VMS, SunOS, OSF, various Linuxes and every Windows instance excluding 2000, 95 and W8.0.
Its not really a comfort zone issue. I spent a good while writing SXcon VB6 code to control the SX CCDS I have owned and want to stick with it if I can. As you might imagine, having written the interface, its intuitive to me and I make fewer 2am errors. Change will be more likely once I fully retire and have time. 🙂
At some point I will be making the move – RPi5s make it more reasonable (I don’t think my 4B has enough grunt), possibly used with Stellarmate – but was waiting for INDI to port to a more recent version of Raspbian. If I already had code that ran the SX 694 under Linux/Python I would already have started writing a QT interface.
Thanks to all for their comments.
Yes, Beelink and MELE look interesting – slightly confusing that the detailed Amazon info on the Beelink says DOS as the OS. Heard ASUS picked up the latest NUCs from Intel when they withdrew from the market, but it look like its the top end of the market only.
With a new disc, the old ACEPC runs fine for Word processing and light browsing via Mint but lacked the grunt for TheSkyX plus a CPU intensive VB6 program.
Have looked at the old Dell workstations and its a good solution, but can’t yet work out how to avoid cable tangle – the 100mmx100mm Minipc sits on the polarscope port of the EQ6.
This morning it occurred to me that as the system is run headless (no keyboard/monitor/mouse) it could have done a Windows update without me knowing. Will check the Intel NUC site and see if there are driver or firmware updates I could try re/installing. Nothing to lose. Its under 3 year guarantee. Something to do this afternoon.
STOP PRESS: A combination of 4 new drivers (2 relating to USBs) and 2023 Firmware upgrade got it going again. Just observed T Crb. Yay! But thanks to everyone anyway, its focussed my mind on what to do about Windows – also, I’m faintly ashamed I had not done a Firmware upgrade before.
It should be mag 25.5 according to JPL Horizons – that is within reach of the HST/JWST but the HST has had bad gyros lately.
For the record, 20231113 18:13*, using Gaia g magnitudes derived from stars in the FOV and applying an aperture that was just 6x 1.55″ pixels across, I get a brightness of about 14.7 with an estimated error of 0.15 (not sure why its a big as that).
*20231113.759
I’m no expert, but I don’t recall seeing A_ORDER, AP_ORDER, CTYPE1/2 or CRPIX1/2 in any FITS file that I had not plate solved. I think they all relate to parameters defining how the x/y pixel location is related to the RA/Dec value associated.
Its a polynomial, usually, so the comments about polynomial order are suggestive. 🙂
I’m not familiar with ASTAP but the file appears to have a WCS and has a record of some lights darks and flats. The keyword CALSTAT is also suggestive ie DFBS – dark, flat, bias, stack?
When you display it does it look like the original frames but with less noise? If so I would assume its your stacked image. You could check that by using a different stacking method (SUM? ADD? Total?) and see if the sky count jumps up. Has any vignetting present diminished? Those would be big hints.
