we also do science
Jean Pascal,
that's amazing. I'd like to explore this possibility, but I don't know anything about the techniques needed to build such light curves. Maybe you could provide some advice about books or web pages that could be of interest to learning about exoplanets observing from a practical point of view. It could maybe be also of interest to other users of this forum.
Congratulations for such a great contribution
Eduardo
thank you Eduardo, take a look at this site : https://www.exoworldsspies.com/en/science/
for the beginning no need of many science skill , the best course that I followed is the AAVSO one I think they propose 2 sessions per year : https://aavso.org/
Amazing work! I was wondering what you wanted to do with all those frames
lukas_demetz I preferred to accumulate the data and process them later after the end of my courses
I see in your graph some 100 dots or so, and the head of it indicates an exposure time of 120 s. with R filter. Shall I assume it is a 120s exposure for each shot? It makes about 3.3 hrs total time. What was the spacing between shots and the total span of the monitoring? Maybe it is given on the graph, but I don't know how to interpret it. Sorry for asking but I'm thrilled about the potential of this use case for our loved SkyGems project.
Eduardo
Yes it is I spend a lot of time and money , some nights I rent 6h to take 120 counts of 120 sec each
Isn't it amazing that we can do this kind of science with basically "normal" telescopes?
I find it amazing that such results can be done with basically consumer hardware. We have a few users that do different kinds of photometry - granted, mostly light curves of asteroids or stars. Some like Jean Pascal do exoplanet transits which I find thrilling.
The new scope coming to Spain - which, btw, I got the message today that a pier adapter required to mount it is expected to arrive "no earlier than beginning of january 2021" - will have some more specific filters: The "classic" photometry filters, as well as one "Near Infrared" filter (NIR from Astrodon) and one specific filter for Ecoplanet monitoring (EXO from Astrodon). I am really curious as to what we can archieve with those.
Hopefully weather will stay cooperative in Spain, right now it's been weeks since the last good night there. Namibia is exceptonal in that regard as the only string of bad weather has been during the week I have been on site
Congrats guys, Lukas you made a very good job with SkyGems! The IDK telescope is really amazing!
Thank you very much lukas for your efforts
Maybe in some years we can also do spectroscopy ?
jpvignes Yes, this is something I have on our todo. I have to be hones, though, as I don't really have any experience on the field. I wonder how we would guide the thing, and which spectrograph to use. Biggest fear is that we might end up with a system which gets too few bookings.
Now, let's suppose that we could work with less expensive equipment, like a Meade or Celestron OTA on a "normal" mount, use a "normal" camera and not the most expensive spectrograph, then yes, I could imagine to put up something like that in Namibia.
lukas_demetz I agree, we don't need a big OTA to do spectro, let me 2 years to have lessons on spectro and I'll be back on the subject. Maybe I can invest in the spectro on my own ?
jpvignes We can discuss about everything
I talked to the Baader guys about spectroscopy, and essentially they told me these things:
- We will want a "good" spectrograph, which alone would cost 10.000 Euro upwards (it needs a camera, too). The less expensive ones simply have not enough resolution
- Resulting from the first point, one wants to have as much aperture as possible to gather as much light as possible. Otherwise you either restrict yourselv to bright targets, or need very long exposure times
Now, a spectroscopy-only system might cost somewhere around 60.000 Euro (using a CDK17). The big question would be how much we would be able to rent it. I fear that such a very specific system would stay idle for too long, but I may be wrong.
We could also create a combination system with an instrument swapper at the back:
How cool is this! We could mount the spectrograph, a classic imaging camera with filter, and maybe even a planetary imaging camera on three interchangable ports. So we would have a system able to operate on spectroscopy, photometry, pretty pictures and even planets. This, however, at a cost: The afermentioned CDK17 in such a configuration would cost nearly 90.000 (!), and due to backfocus constraints, one can either use the CDK17 or CDK24 to make it work. I dunno. Would be very cool
Hi all,
for spectrography within the reach of amateurs there is only one address and it is French: https://www.shelyak.com/?lang=en
they are spectrographs made to be accessible to amateurs but of professional quality, I will see that later.
on the other hand, what is the name of the instrument for dividing the luminous flux into three?