Blog / Monthly archive / September 2010
September 2010
Post-Mid Eclipse Activities
I've been largely missing from the CS website for the last several weeks and thought it was worth providing an update of my activities, both related to CS and towards my dissertation.
On the CS front, the DSLR team has finished an air-mass corrected reduction spreadsheet that is mathematically sound. We think it's ready to go main-stream and hope to have it online soon. We'll have a new tutorial for using this sheet. A while back Tom Pearson and I wrote an article on DSLR photometry and submitted it to a popular astronomy magazine. It was accepted for publication, but after six months of waiting for it to progress to publication we decided to pull the article and publish in a different venue. We are in the process of adapting the content for the new target.Read more
Thoughts after the workshop...
Hello All,
Well, we've had some time to settle back into life after the 2nd Citizen Sky Workshop in San Francisco. I still have some left over "warm fuzzies" from our time there. Our venue, the California Academy of Sciences, was gorgeous and the staff there were very helpful and friendly. We had a wonderful group of attendees and speakers. I am very excited that everything was caught on video and look forward to posting those on the website soon. I have already started to post the speakers' presentation files (ppt/pdf) so that you can follow along with the slides as you watch the videos once they are posted. Read more
What's on Tap?
The first year of the project was dedicated to training to observe the star and report your observations. We also worked on the site infrastructure. Since the funding came through late, we had to push a lot of what we originally had planned for years 1 and 2 - into year 1 alone. This meant it was a hectic year, but it now means years 2-3 can be at a more leisurely , natural pace.
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Mystery in the Sky Documentary
Click here for an important Sept. 24 update! An attendee of the first Citizen Sky workshop in 2009 produced a documentary of the project called Mystery of the Sky. I have seen it and consider it very professionally produced and impressive. The director/produder, Guustaaf Damave, is looking for backers to help fund the creation of the first run of DVDs. Click here for more information. The DVD includes interviews with participants at the workshop, both amateur and professional, and background material on epsilon Aurigae itself. As of this posting, the project has raised about 1/3 of what is needed to produce the DVD.Read more
Workshop 2 Update
Greetings fromSan Francisco, where the weather and hospitality has been awesome. If you live in the area, or palm to visit, definitely check out the California Academies of Science. It is likely the best science museum I've ever visited.
We are the midst of day two of the 2nd Citizen Sky workshop. This morning I talked about the AAVSO database and then Michael Koppelman gave a conceptual talk about uncertainty in data. He had an awesome animated gif showing how binning data can increase precision to a point, but you go too far you lose the structure In the data - basically throwing the baby out with the bath water.Read more
