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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.
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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.
