bkloppenborg's blog posts

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
 

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

 

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:

It has been a while since I last provided a public update on the teams in which I am involved and even longer since I discuss what I've been up to, so in the next few paragraphs I'll summarize these activities. If you are looking for a team, the MIRA and eps Aur History teams I discuss below can always use more members as they have both have large projects on which assistance will be greatly appreicated.

Teams

The DSLR Documentation and Reduction TeamRead more

Members from the MIRA Fourier coefficient team held an online chat session to discuss what needed to be done for the upcoming JAAVSO publication as well as some useful features to be implemented in VStar.  The chat transcript is attached to this post.  

The group established a timeline:
2011-xx-xx: Generate a list of ~400 MIRAs (completed)
2011-xx-xx: Pre-process these MIRAs to remove discrepant data points between JD 2440000 - 24550000 (deadline needs to be set)
2011-09-23 (or before): Brian provides the team with 10-20 sample MIRAs with known properties (periods, changes in periods, etc.) for testing/training.
2011-10-15: Have analysis of the sample MIRA data complete and report back to the team.
2011-11-15: Abstract and extended outline complete.
2012-01-15: First rough draft of JAAVSO publication complete
2012-03-01: JAAVSO publication submitted.

More details and an updated timeline can be found on the team timetable page (team membership may be required to view this page).

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Now that the epsilon Auriage eclipse has passed, several people have been asking me and Dr. Bob "what's next?"  For me I'll spend this academic year finishing up my dissertation, helping finish team publications, and looking for my first postdoc.  Dr. Stencel, on the other hand, has an intrest in several other systems one of which is Zeta Auriage.

Back in 2009 Jeffrey Hopkins and CSky teamed up for a mini observing campaign of the secondary eclipse of Zeta Auriage, one of the other stars in the asterisim known as "the kids" in Auriage.  Now three years later the primary eclipse of this star system has arrived and we are yet again in need of your assistance to catch the eclipse.Read more

I thought I would issue a plug for a talk I'm giving shortly.  On this Thursday, July 28 at 8:00 PM I will be presenting a talk on epsilon Auriage and Citizen Science at Nebraska Nature and Visitor's Center during the Platte Valley Astronomical Observers's monthly meeting.  Weather permitting, we'll also have an observing session afterward.  So, if you happen to be somewhere nearby we'd be happy to have you attend.

About a month ago I wrote a post discussing what I'm doing with some astrometric data from the Sproul Observatory. This week I'm happy to report I have the paper almost entirely written and am working out the last few kinks in the analysis. It's been a serious uphill battle in both learning about astrometry and reducing the data, but I think it's been worth it.

In this post I'm going to talk a little more about the data and how it is reduced. In the prior post I mentioned that the data was taken on photographic plates starting in 1938 and ending in the early 1980s. I only have a small subset of the entire set from Sproul (about 40% actually) which is enough to show the effect I was looking for, but not much more.Read more