Blog / Monthly archive / April 2011
April 2011
Halfway through egress
Greetings. Barely a month from solar conjunction again (early June) and epsilon Aurigae is sinking into the sunset. At the same time, the star has 'taken a breather' - after rising in brightness by 0.5 mag (up nearly 60% in energy terms), the star stalled at V~3.3 during April. A similar still-stand was seen during the 1984 eclipse egress as well, suggesting some persistent opacity around the trailing side of the disk. No clear spectroscopic signatures reported so far, but stay tuned.
Nonetheless, the egress is predicted to end during May, and as many will put the star up on the shelf for another 27 years, some of us will continue to observe and work on data reduction. We encourage everyone in Citizen Sky to continue in one or both modes for at least the balance of the year.
A variety of major telescope observations have been obtained recently as well, including the following:Read more
Reading Papers that impact your own work.
I spent the entire day Friday reading papers. I can already imagine your groans of disapproval for such an exciting blog post idea, but in reality reading papers is a critical portion of research. Sometimes the papers you read really help you with your research, and other times they smash your hopes of making a new contribution. It's this horrible aspect that happened today and I thought I would spend a few minutes discussing where one can go from here.
Infrared Photometry
Infrared photometry is yet another area where amateurs are encroaching on what used to be the sole domain of professionals. Two amateurs, in particular, have been collecting an amazing near-IR light curve of epsilon Aurigae.Read more
Newsletter #8 is Now Online!
The eighth issue of the Citizen Sky Newsletter has now been posted!
