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Take a look at this poster that was presented at the most recent AAS meeting: "Long-Term Optical and Near-Infrared Spectroscopic Monitoring of epsilon Aurigea During the 2009-11 Eclipse"  Our data are even used in one of the figures!!

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Greetings Everyone,

The DSLR Documentation and Reduction team will host a team meeting in the AAVSO chatroom to discuss the final elements of our publication in JAAVSO on Saturday, Jan 28 at 19:00 UTC (2:00 PM Eastern).

The transcript can be found here.

The chat room can be accessed by pointing your browser here. Details about how to use dedicated chat clients (highly recommended) are here.

Brian
 

Another visual, night sky citizen science project needs your help...

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In a soon-to-print edition of Sky & Telescope there will be a feature article discussing epsilon Auriage and the contributions from amateur astronomers.  Before that comes out in press there are two podcast interviews between Bob Naeye from S&T and Dr. Bob which can be found in the link below:

http://www.skyandtelescope.com/skytel/beyondthepage/Robert-Stencel-on-Epsilon-Aurigae-137116093.html

 

     Now that the eclipse of 2009-2011 has ended, we can begin to reflect on the discoveries and realizations made possible by the new data.  To see where we are going, let's reflect on some more of the story leading up to the present.Read more

Greetings Everyone,

The DSLR Documentation and Reduction team will host a team meeting in the AAVSO chatroom to discuss our contribution to the upcoming JAAVSO special issue on Thursday, December 22 (due to a power outage and subsequent damage at AAVSO it has been rescheduled to) Wednesday, December 28 at 2:00 PM Eastern (19:00 UTC)Read more

It is very rare that I do a repost of a blog, but this time I had to make an exception.  Each day our friends over at Astrobites summarize a paper on ArXiv (or produce some other, similarly interesting blog post) written at an undergraduate readership level.  Yesterday's post discussed how brightness from stars (i.e. photometry) is actually measured:

http://astrobites.com/2011/12/15/how-do-astronomers-measure-the-brightness-of-something/

It goes into some discussion of spectral types and filters so it's well worth a read if you have some time to spare.

The Mira Fourier Coefficient Team has scheduled two chat sessions to discuss the "to do" items for the upcoming JAAVSO journal article.  The team is truely international so scheduling the chat resulted in early morning times in the US.  The two chats will be held at:Read more

Chat 1:

Check out a new light curve we have posted that contains all your data submitted since the start of the campaign!

As 2011 dwindles down to a close, so does any spectroscopic evidence for the eclipse.  Photometrically, the star returned to its 'normal' out of eclipse variations during late summer, featuring +/- 0.05 mag quasi-periodic fluctuations.

It's been a trail of discovery during 2009-2011, and study of the results will go on for years, but during the next few months, reviewing and updating early statements and claims seems appropriate.

Epsilon Aurigae has fascinated astronomers for parts of three centuries -- so far. The NASA Astrophysical Database Service keeps track of publications related to stars like this one. For the period prior to 1930, 23 papers are on record; for 1930-1960, 54 papers appeared, for 1961-1990 there were 200 papers, reflecting the explosion of interest surrounding the 1983 eclipse (with 173 of those during 1981-1990); more recently (1991-2011) there have been many dozens of papers, thus far.Read more