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This is indeed an exciting new area of astronomy which we should promote but, as pointed out by many, the techniques used have been developed mostly by the VS community over many years. It seems to me that the solution most likely to work is to set up an EP subsection of the VSS and give the coordinator plenty of autonomy to set up and promote EP observing programmes. This shouldn’t be too much of an extra load on the VSS Director but it will have the benefit of starting off with the significant resources that the VSS already has. If, after a few years, the EP programme is vigorous we should reconsider whether to make it a stand-alone section.
This conjunction has certainly encouraged a lot of people to have a go at imaging this (currently) rather puny comet. Denis Buczynski has just updated our image archive and you can see the results for 21P here.
Very nice event. Not sure about the music though. Who’d have thought that the state of Russian roads and insurance companies would have led to such an increase in captures of these very bright events. Someone should be doing some stats.
That’s really sad news. Maurice was a great observer who always got into a field before anyone else did. I remember marvelling at his CCD images in the early days of the electronic era.
Peter – That’s a shame but, as others have said, we have constraints too and so it is not always possible to avoid a clash.
The other talks are now up on our website here.
David, Thanks for the heads up on this. I imaged it this morning using a widefield instrument so the trail is small but it is visible. The observation is here.
Brilliant work. These absolute spectra really show the evolution well.
Do you think physics will ever adopt SI units? It is one of the significant differences between physics and engineering and I have to keep looking up the scale factor between ergs and Joules. I suppose CGS is better than BTUs and feet…
So it does. Denis is a very dedicated comet observer not so used to imaging bright point sources that don’t move…
After a nice day the evening was very hazy with a lot of cirrus but I did manage to get a picture of it in a small gap. The attached is a single 15s exposure at ISO800 with a 100mm f/2 lens at f/2.8. Capella is the bright star at lower left. The nova appears very red on this image.
Great video. If you stack the frames using minimum pixel hold you should be able to get a nice still showing it moving across. I’ve only ever succesfully imaged this once on 2011 May 25 using a DSLR. Each video frame was minimum pixel stacked to get this effect.
Indeed. I’ve been doing this for years with a cheap Dell in the observatory. My PC death rate is around one death every 2-3 years but I keep a disk image so replacement is dead easy. Windows RDP is certainly secure enough to use on an internal network. I wouldn’t expose it directly to the internet though unless your network firewall can restrict access to particular IPs.
The GPL Positional Astronomy Library (PAL) can be found on Github here. It is an open-source reworking of Patrick Wallace’s slalib and it contains all the functions you need to do this. Alternatively the original slalib in Fortran is GPL and should be available somewhere. Even if you can’t use these functions directly they are a good source of information on how to do the conversion accurately.
