Observation by Dr Paul Leyland: Barnard's Star, 2019-2025

Uploaded by

Dr Paul Leyland

Observer

Dr Paul Leyland

Observed

2025 Aug 15 - 21:50

Uploaded

2025 Nov 06 - 16:37

Objects

Barnard's-Star

Equipment

0.4m Dilworth Relay
SBIG-8XE and SX 814 CCD cameras

Exposure

Either 3, 5 or 10 seconds depending on year.

Location

Tacande Observatory, MPC J22

Target name

Barnard's Star

Title

Barnard's Star, 2019-2025

About this image

This is the latest in the long-running series of images which show the large proper motion of Barnard's star. The stacked images were taken taken at roughly yearly intervals.

Although Barnard's Star is a variable, V2500 Oph, that is not the reason why each image has a different size. The exposure time differs from year to year (I know better now and subsequent years will use a 3 second exposure) as does the size of the seeing disk.

Files associated with this observation

2019-2025.png (2.0 MB)

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Comments

Dr Paul Leyland, 2025 Nov 06 - 17:22 UTC

Since posting I have performed some astrometry on this image.

On 2019-08-30 (JD 2458725) the J2000 position of the star was measured to be 17:57:47.34 +04:44:59.2 and on 2025-08-15 (JD 2460902) it was located at 17:57:47.10 +04:46:01.8. Therefore it moved (47.10-47.34-)*15 = -3.6 arcseconds in RA and (46-44)*60 + (01.8-59.2) = 62.6 arcseconds in Dec over a period of (2460902-2458725)/365.25 = 5.96 years.

The proper motion is therefore calculated to be -0.603 arcsec / year in RA and 10.503 arcsec/year in Dec. The values from the GAIA EDR3 catalogue are -0.80155 and 10.362394 respectively. I believe the slight discrepancy arises from the difficulty of measuring a position to a precision of, say 0.1 arcsecond when the seeing disk has a FWHM of a few arcseconds.

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