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A nice looking instrument Tony.
I like the idea of a high(ish) resolution version. Like the LHIRES, the chromatic aberrations should be less of an issue. The foot of the lamp lines look rather broad though. Do you think this is down to the quality of the optics? (I think I remember seeing something similar with a batch LHIRES which had poor quality doublet lenses, seen as an “elephant’s foot” shaped lines) . What focal ratio are you running ?
Did you see the results Terry Bohlsen recently posted from his version at similar resolution (presumably also with an 1800 l/mm grating) on ARAS ?
http://www.spectro-aras.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=5&t=2172#p11890
Cheers
Robin
Here is the reduced spectrum. (red, filtered to R~300 resolution)
mag ~17 is the faintest target I have attempted with the ALPY600 setup and the SNR is very low. The broad H alpha line is obvious though and other Balmer lines are present too. I have also marked the Fe II curtain lines though they are only marginally detected above the noise.
Cheers
Robin
Here is a raw spectrum image from tonight (ALPY 600, 6600s total exposure.) It is very faint but the broad H alpha emission is clear. I will try to reduce it to see what else I can pick out
Robin
Went for a spectrum last night with the ALPY 200 but found that a series of power cuts during the storm yesterday had corrupted the observatory computer drive. 15.6 is bright for an M31 nova so definitely worth trying for even with a standard ALPY and novae spectra still show strong emission features later on even when they start to fade in measured brightness.
Robin
Hi James
That is nice image of SN2018ivc I took a spectrum on 24th and found it quite tricky to separate it from the galaxy core. Here is what it looked like in the spectrograph guider, and a low resolution spectrum showing H alpha emission at the galaxy redshift, characteristic of a core collapse supernova (It was already too low for me when it was announced the night before so I was beaten to a classification for this one by professional teams in Japan who got there a few hours before me)
Cheers
Robin
Hi Kevin,
Are you emailing Francois Teyssier direct ?
http://spectro-aras.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=16&t=804
(The on line system was innundated by spambots I believe)
Cheers
Robin
Here is the trend in H alpha line strength (EW) since the disc loss episode in 1988 to ~2015, from fig 1 in this paper
The EW currently is ~20 A so a continuing downward trend currently
This paper shows examples of the long term variation (1987-2001) at H alpha and He 6678 including an episode where the disc was completely lost in 1988 and cyclic changes with periods 0.6-2 yrs
https://www.aanda.org/articles/aa/abs/2001/47/aa1796/aa1796.html
The variability that Kevin highlighted (and confirmed in the other spectra) shows small scale variations in the line profiles at much shorter timescales though
Robin
As I understand it from Paul Roche’s comments this is a long term project (with a timescale of years), primarily to alert when there has been a change in the disc state, indicated by changes in the H alpha line so similar to typical Be star monitoring. Though this would likely change if something significant is seen. High resolution H alpha spectra will probably show more subtle changes first but a low resolution spectrum would also pick up significant changes in emission line strength so I would suggest an occasional look say once every few weeks or so, particularly if you see in the BAA database (where most of the campaign spectra are being stored) that there has been a significant gap since the last observation.
Cheers
Robin
Hi Jack,
I use PHD2 but I find it can oscillate as Kevin describes. (It has some features useful for slit guiding like a virtual slit graticule and guiding on a specific location but does not have a specific algorithm to deal with a split star image)
I know Astroart has a specific slit guiding algorithm, though I have not tried it.
I think Prism is quite popular among the French spectroscopists. For example Olivier Thizy uses it with scripts to automate his observing
https://observatoire-belle-etoile.blogspot.com/2018/08/otzauto-finally-some-automatic.html
Cheers
Robin
Hi John,
OK so comparing with the errors you had at the start of the thread it looks like you now have a good calibration across the range, including at H alpha where ISIS only uses lamp lines. We still do not understand why the lamp gives increasing errors towards the blue end but I think we should probably accept this as a win for now !
Cheers
Robin
Hi Kevin,
Yes I believe the Zolner was indeed a direct vision spectrograph using a grating. (It may actually have been a grism) The cylindrical lenses were used to widen the spectrum to make the lines more visible. I think it was mounted after an eyepiece, making effectively a collimated design with the eyepiece acting as the collimator and the eye as the camera lens so perhaps more like a forerunner of the ALPY operated slitless. The basic price works out at around £200 in today’s money
Robin
Hi John,
If something is moving in the spectrograph, you should see this in the lamp spectrum ie calibrating the lamp spectrum using an earlier lamp spectrum should show an error. The spring in the core module is there to hold the collimator lens in position, To hold the grism in position, the allen head grub screws should have been retightened after adjusting to make the lines perpendicular to the dispersion direction.
Cheers
Robin
Having said that, comparing the line profiles of both the narrow lined star I used and the internal lamp, they have the same FWHM within 5% and there is no sign of asymmetry in line profiles across the spectrum in either case (dominated by the slit width) so it looks like this is not the cause.
Robin
Hi John,
Don’t throw out your calibration module just yet !
There is a just detectable systematic difference between my ALPY internal lamp and the Argon “Filly Cross” lamp mounted at the edge of the telescope aperture in line with the slit but it is small (Calibrating the Filly lamp with the ALPY lamp gives +1A error around 7000A, 0 error around 5000A and -0.7 around 4100A).
Cheers
Robin
The errors are within the FWHM of the slit image so I wonder if it could be something distorting the line profile eg :-
Coma from the ALPY camera lens distorting the line shapes more at the edges, which will depend on the f ratio of the incident light and appear as a variation in dispersion.
On stars, some sort of chromatic aberration in the telescope optics producing a wavelength dependent asymmetry in the psf of the star which alters the distribution of light across the slit and hence the line profile.
Cheers
Robin
Hi John,
Your wavelength error trend using just the lamp lines seems similar to mine qualitatively eg post #37. Your variable offset as shown at H alpha is different to what I see though. My calibration is consistently good at H alpha.
I now have some data for the Filly lamp (I used the “cross” lamp which is just Argon) There does appear to be something subtly different. I will report back when I have figured out what is going on.
Cheers
Robin
OK, I have now manually calibrated using:-
The standard set of lines used by ISIS for the automatic fit (lamp lines only)
The same set with the 3946 line removed
The set of lines used for Hugh’s calibration in post #36, less the H alpha line which I do not see in my spectrum
The calibrated star spectra were identical every case with errors the same as those in my post #37, within the fit uncertainty of +-0.5A, even down to 3750A
Lamp spectra calibrated using these fits showed no significant wavelength errors so the problem, in my case at least, appears to be caused by some systematic difference in the way the spectrograph sees the internal calibration lamp compared with the star. The error is wavelength dependent rather than a simple offset so is going to be difficult to correct for.
I think my next step will be to check what my “filly dot” lamp, which is mounted over the telescope aperture, gives.
Cheers
Robin
Hi Andrew,
Yes I was planning to do a manual run without that line (and will still do, and I will also try Hugh’s line set, which uses that line but also other different lines) though after looking at Hugh’s errors which are good past that wavelength and mine which deteriorate before then, I now suspect that may not be the problem. I also had a closer look at this line. As I said,it is a triplet and therefore suspect but in Richard Walker’s atlas the 3946.1 line of the triplet is significantly stronger so I doubt the error in that line is more than 1A at most.
Cheers
Robin
