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Dave,
That’s a good question. The BAA has a proud history of encouraging and collecting observations from its observers and then performing analysis on the results, often in cooperation with professional partners.
In the Comet Section we archive all suitable submitted images here. These images help us understand the morphology (shape and activity) of comets and their tails. Estimates of brightness (photometry) are submitted to COBS or directly and these are used to generate comet magnitude parameters and look for differences from return to return. They also contribute to predictions for future returns. Positions (astrometry) are submitted directly to the MPC and these go towards computing the orbital path of comets. Monitoring comets for outbursts is also important work which often leads to very interesting results. Have a look at the results for the recent outburst of 174P reported here.
A summary of observations of bright comets is published annually in the JBAA and special events (such as outbursts) are written up as papers. We also have a section discussion list here which is used as a forum for comet related discussions. We have close links with international comet groups and professionals and we know that observations from BAA observers are often used in their analyses.
Nick.
It’s probably better to put things like this on your members page. People will see it there and can comment if they wish.
Those are really useful resources although it took me a while to realise that the “Event” heading in the table here was actually the date!
It’s also worth calibrating the camera since, depending on the model, you may have a few fields of buffering depending on the sensor readout before the analogue video gets out of the camera. I’m sure that the UK asteroid occultation guys (Tim, Alex etc) will have a good handle on that.
Jeremy – You might want to consider posting items like this to your members page. That has the advantage that all of your postings are in one place. People can still comment if necessary.
Here are a few screengrabs from the infamous Channel 4 documentary “Earth Calling Basingstoke” featuring some of John’s telescopes and his mirror grinding machine. The whole documentary is on Youtube. It was not amateur astronomy’s finest hour.
Very impressive. 3D printing (or ALM as we should call it now) really is quite a mature technology. What printer are you using?
I suspect that would be a bit high-brow for most US commercial FM stations and one wouldn’t want to condone putting someone’s eyes out just because they didn’t cut their hair.
Steve – I remember driving back from the eclipse and they were playing “eclipse related” tracks in rotation on most of the Nebraska FM stations we could find. TEotH was one, You’re So Vain was another. Then the eclipse connection got really weak.
Grant – Nice. This Celestron astrograph seems to perform very well at f/2.2 although your H18 isn’t that much of a test for a thing that is supposed to have a 40mm diameter well corrected focal plane! Are you going to try it with a bigger sensor? I’d certainly be interested to see how it performs in real life with a full-frame (36x24mm) sensor.
Andrew – Nice observation. I guess this is way too faint to see any colour in the SN even with the 24-inch.
Here’s an image of it from a few minutes ago. The telescope wasn’t tracking very well and the SN is very close to the centre of the galaxy but you can see it.
Those were the days. We made a Wimshurst Machine at school a long time ago and used it for all sorts of interesting experiments. I wouldn’t want to fill in the risk assessment for one of those now. Just think of all of those volts.
So they have. Here’s a link to the Times obit although it is behind a paywall so you’ll need to register or be a Times subscriber to read it.
Thanks Martin. You can certainly see where all the Dexion went! I wonder what his neighbours in Dartford though of it all?
Roy. It may be the video compression but different decoders behave differently too. Could you give me a specific video and time offset where the effect is significant so that I can have a look. Nick.
You don’t need the HD version of UFO capture for SD cameras. I’m using UFO Capture V2.24 under Windows 7/64-bit. The PC has three PCI Osprey 210 video capture cards and I run three instances of UFO capture for three cameras, 2 Watec 902H2s and 1 other B&W monitor camera. The PC is an old Dell Optiplex 780 with an Intel E8400 CPU running at 3GHz and 8 GB of memory. Each instance of UFO Capture uses around 150MB of memory so they are very lightweight. Each instance will use a different CPU core if it can and even with all three cards detecting the CPU load never goes above 30%
I certainly prefer having a PCI card for the video capture since I occasionally had dropped frames using a USB dongle. The Osprey 210 is a really nice card. They are a bit pricey but occasionally come up at a decent price on ebay. I’ve never had any problems since I started using it.
I don’t know the details of their licensing model but the problem is solved if you use a single PC.
