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Roger, that's beautiful. What camera did you use for this?
- Mark M

One of the students I'm working with was interested in seeing a comet, and found that C/2017 T2 is currently well-placed in Perseus. I pointed the scope there and over the course of a few hours was able to put together a good image sequence: - Mark

Okay, here's an update. This graph covers Betelgeuse's past 7 years, and includes some more recent data than the previous graph:
This has become a noteworthy excursion from its normal behavior. (And it really makes Orion look strange.)

- Mark

Bruce: You're absolutely correct. Betelgeuse is relatively faint right now. It's now around magnitude +1.3. Three months ago it was around magnitude +0.6. It's not an unusual variation for Betelgeuse (which is a known irregular red giant variable), but it's the faintest it's been for several years. ...

Thanks, Mike. Just goes to show that there's something that you lose when you stare into the computer monitor too much instead of going outside and looking up into the sky. lightcurve.jpg This is the lightcurve that I've collected for this star. I've updated the blog with the lightcurve and my first...

Lee Cusumano does double duty as Tiverton High School's chemistry and astronomy teacher. I've been working with her astronomy classes the past few months. She brings an enormous amount of enthusiasm to these classes, and I've been bringing some hands-on experience and knowledge of how observational ...

I tried another transit last night, with much more ambiguous results than the first try. Here's the best graph I could create: Graph-5xbin.png I'm skeptical of this curve. Small changes in analysis parameters cause big changes in the ingress/egress times and the depth of the curve. Times don't exact...

My software (Astrometrica)) was showing S/N of around 230 and it still wasn't adequate. Supposedly one needs 250 or better to pull the small differential out of the noise. And even then you need to do a rolling average. Pete Pete: AstroImageJ shows an SNR of 70-108 for the target star over the dura...

As I get ready for observing session #2, I've been pulling together a list of the things that I learned during the prior observing run. One of the items on the list is about saturated stars. Before I chose 3 minutes as the exposure time for the first observing run, I was convinced that I had checked...

Pete wrote: ↑Fri Dec 07, 2018 1:23 pm That's pretty fine Mark. Do you recall what you were running for S/N? That's always been my bugaboo.

Pete

So I don't really know how to calculate that (anybody care to provide a good reference?), but my back-of-the-envelope calculation is right around 100:1.