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There is an article on “A Year of Betelgeuse“ in the October edition of The AGB Newsletter:
https://www.astro.keele.ac.uk/AGBnews/issues/AGB279.pdf
Emily Levesque (U of Washington) discusses what the recent dusty dimming might mean for other red supergiants, On page 3 to 4
Corroborative evidence for phosphine in the Venusian atmosphere published today:
…another ArXiv paper on “The carbon footprint of large astronomy meetings”, compares the annual meeting of the European Astronomical Society held physically in France in 2019, but online in 2020. They conclude a 3000-fold reduction in C footprint resulted. Full paper also in Nature Astronomy.
Presumably the BAA’s C footprint has also reduced, but less so since few members travel by air. Nevertheless, I am longing for the time we can meet F2F again….
The Venus/phosphine discovery team has also written a “hypothesis article” on “The Venusian Lower Atmosphere Haze as a Depot for Desiccated Microbial Life: A Proposed Life Cycle for Persistence of the Venusian Aerial Biosphere”.
It is available on ArXiv here (pdf link at top right of that page)
Although the Nature Astronomy website has the paper available to read, I find it’s a bit difficult to follow on the screen and wanted to print it. The pdf link they gave only downloads the first page and then freezes. However, I note the full 54 pages are available on ArXiv today for anyone who is interested.
The Nature Astronomy paper has just been made available as open access.
Quick update. A USB 2 hub (unpowered) Seems to have eliminated the problem. A few 100 images so far and each is flawless.
Many thanks to everyone who helped online and offline! It is much appreciated.
Yes good point William. I am aware of that and my tests have been conducted with everything well spaced out and no coils etc.
Thank you William.
There is no difference whether the laptop charger is plugged in or not.
I’ll have a look at ferrite clamps
Jeremy
James Dawson updated most of the drivers on the laptop
The lines disappeared after updating .NET Framework. But came back after a few reboots.
Curiously we can run 100s of images will James is on via TeamViewer, but when he drops the connection the lines come back. Obs not practical way forward!
Grant. Tried 3 and 2 m cables
Paul: I don’t have a hub
So, my brand new HP laptop arrived and all works well, except the SX CCD camera!!
Most downloads have short white lines as shown in the screenshot.
Observations:
1. The lines are in different position each download and are occasionally absent
2. I get problems with AstroArt, with SX software and with SharpCap (the last 2 give error code 1235)
3. I have tried several different USB cables
4. Both the laptops USB 3.1 ports give the same result
5. No other programs are running on the laptop and it’s in flight mode, so hardly any background activity
Terry Platt at SX has been very helpful. He has sent updated drivers and updated firmware. He has suggested it might be caused by system interrupts (computer doing other tasks) during download.
Might anyone have any suggestions?
The current VSS Circular contains an article by Drs Chris Lloyd and Mark Kidger which reports that recent observations of Betelgeuse, after its summer conjunction, reveal that the star started to fade almost immediately after recovering from its historic fade last season.
An Astronomers Telegram a few days ago by Costantino Sigismondi and his team suggests that “a second dust cloud ejected by the star is passing over its photosphere along our line of sight”.
As Betelgeuse is now becoming visible, further observations are encouraged.
Don’t forget that you can also catch up on Mark Kidger’s excellent webinar on Betelgeuse on the BAA YouTube channel.
I appreciate everyone’s comments – thank you!
Was not aware about the implications of cable length, Peter. My cable is 3 m, so hopefully OK.
Grant, my SX is a USB camera, not a serial camera with USB adapter.
I’m now much more confident, so I’ve gone ahead and ordered the laptop with USB 3 only. Fingers crossed!
This is excellent work, Alex. Thank you to you and the team, including Roger Pickard, Tracie Heywood, Terry Miles, John Fairweather and Bob Dryden, for working hard to get Melvyn’s and other observers’ obs into the VSS database. Brilliant news about King’s observations!
Only this week we were contacted by Prof Edward Guinan and his student for BAA VSS data on Betelgeuse from the 1890’s. Edward is at Villanova University and has published on the recent fade of Betelgeuse and these data will help his research.
As you say, there is likely other data out there, in observing books and elsewhere that could be very valuable. One potential source I have thought about is the English Mechanic. In the 19th century it was quite common for people to write letters to the newspaper with their VS observations. However, in many cases some details are missing. It would be quite an arduous task to go through all the editions, even though the scanned EM is available on disc. Another project for the future….
David Swan has an image on his Members page of the nova taken last night.
I’ve seen CCD and Vis observations from the early hours of this morning (30th) placing it between mag 13.5 and 13.9.
