Blog / Monthly archive / May 2011
May 2011
The end of eclipse
The next few days mark the closest approach of the Sun to epsilon Aurigae, as part of the annual solar motion. This also makes observations rather difficult, given the lingering twilight and the high airmasses involved. At last report, epsilon appeared to be between 3.2 and 3.3 mag, visual. This is behind schedule, relative to predictions based on prior eclipse light curves - epsilon Aurigae was predicted to have reached full brightness, mag 3.0, by mid-May 2011. The evidence suggests that this portion of the disk may be less transparent than the corresponding ingress portion of the disk.Read more
218 AAS Meeting
Joint AAVSO+AAS meeting in Boston, May 22-26, 2011
More than one thousand professional astronomers will be meeting in Boston to compare notes on a wide variety of astronomy and astrophysics at the spring meeting of the American Astronomical Society, jointly held with AAVSO. On the varied agenda will be 4 posters and at least 2 talks about the status of epsilon Aurigae eclipse studies and Citizen Sky support of these activities. I plan to summarize what the campaign effort has meant for professionals and amateurs, as well as report on the discovery of high temperature helium absorption in infrared spectra during mid-eclipse. Naomi Pequette has applied powerful disk modelling software to epsilon Aur data and concludes that a fair amount of accretion must be occuring. Brian Kloppenborg will report on progress toward improving the orbital solution for epsilon Aurigae, by combining astrometric, spectroscopic and interferometric data. Brian will also be reporting on how Citizen Sky teamwork has fared, and ARead more
What are the essential things for an introduction to astronomy?
Today I had the opportunity to talk with a group of high school students in an astronomy class at University Schools, a charter school, up the road in Greely, CO. The last time I was around high school students was when I did some classroom observing as part of the education program at my undergraduate institution, Hastings College. The group came to DU's historic Chamberlin observatory as part of an outing to Denver.
The Disk Revealed: Part 2
Back in February I posted an image showing the outline of the disk:
but after talking with Aaron about his recent visit to Tufts, I realized that I didn't actually explain what was in the image. So I thought I would take a moment and put up a different graphic:
Egress light curve from visual, photometric and student sources
This semester the Tufts University introduction to astronomy class observed epsilon Aurigae as their course lab. The class has around 250 students and they do not have access to equipment for a formal lab. So epsilon Aurigae was perfect since it is bright enough to be seen from campus with the unaided eye and happens to be emerging from the eclipse. They were tasked to observe once every two weeks and report their data to Citizen Sky.
The above light curve includes all Citizen Sky data since February 1, 2011. The blue line is the 7 day mean curve based on data only from Tufts students. The red line is the 7d mean for visual observation from non-Tufts Citizen Sky participants and the green line is for photometric observations from Citizen Sky participants.Read more
