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The early bird catches ... epsilon Aurigae :-)
Hi all!
I guess now is the start of the "early morning, 0-dark-100" eps Aur observation season :-). So I did what I liked least (getting up early on Sundays) and hunted for eps Aur.
I was a bit insecure when actually to do the measurement, as there is an obvious trade-off.
Either do it real early, and you still have a pitch black sky, but eps Aur is still kind of low above the horizon and you have an increased risk to get all sorts of unwanted effects like extinction, clouds and haze because the path thru the atmoshere is so much longer.
Or wait until eps Aur rises, but then you'll get increased sky glow from the sun preparing to rise :-).
Hmmm.... how do others here deal with this trade off ?
CS
HB
For me (in Sweden) the biggest problem during the summer has been the bright sky, so the only possibilityhas beento do the meassurment (DSLR-photometry) at local midnight at around 01:00. With correction for extinction using a lot of compairsion stars I think it has worked fairly good. Now it is a bonus for every night, the sky is getting darker and epsilongo higher up, so I stick with the strategy to take the photos before I go to bed. I think I have to wait to 01:00 some more week and after that it will work from 00:00. Thomas Karlsson
I have gotten two morning data points in H and J on eps Aur, both of them last week. I stayed up all night and waited for it to rise high enough (about 15 degrees) to get good measurements. This was at 4 AM EDT, by 5 AM, the sky was beginning to lighten. No issues with early morning fog. I did get some data on a few other stars during the overnight, as well. I remember when I was young I thought that it was great to stay up all night-- its a whole lot tougher now:-) I think that from here on out, I will just get up early instead of staying up all night. Tom (RTH)