Big fireball of february 27th

On february 27th morning, around 4h24 UT (5h24 local time), my all sky camera captured a bright fireball which was also detected by 15 other FRIPON stations.

From Winter to Summer in one week !

Incredible... with 50cm of snow end of january and snow still falling on february 11th, we went to hot 23°C days on february 17th and beautiful spring/summer sunny weather!

from january 28th...

...to february 16th !

And we now have a long serie of clear skies (unfortunatly the Moon is also very bright)...

BeSS stats in 2018

2018 has been a all-time record with more than 2600 high resolution -R>5000) Halpha spectra submitted into the Be Star Spectra database in one year alone. The great thing is that those come from lot of different sources (ie observers), this is great:




Cumulated, it is more than 18000 high resolution Halpha spectra submitted by amateur into BeSS database:

The only drawback is that half of those spectra have been taken from France, a broader geographical coverage would be better!

2018 statistics by exposure time (better than number of spectra) has been done by Franck Houpert - 2600 hours of total exposure time during this year !!!

  And I did a quick geographical analysis of BeSS observers since the beginning:

 european map of BeSS observers

 worldwide map of BeSS observers

Anyway, the observing power has helped covering more and more Be stars and some have a very close monitoring. In 2018, three targets have been monitored closely, unfortunatly with no outburst: phi And, 28 Cyg and omi And.

We can mention the excellent coverage of V442 And  with 238 high resolution Halpha spectra taken in 2018 and the followup of the spring outburst of this star. In 2017 there were 57 Halpha spectra acquired. Those two years are the baseline for hopefully a great study of this system. And lot of those spectra are actually echelle ones and covering important lines such as He I, Hbeta, Hgamma...

Of course, there are more than 1100 spectra of gamma Cas in BeSS recorded through the years (cumulated), more than what is really necessary. But hey, why not? :-)


On a side note, I am happy to report that I have now submitted more orders in BeSS than ELODIE archive - cool...

 Anyway, Be Star Spectropscopy rocks - it is always fun to see subtil or drastic changes in matter of months or days. There are still lot of unknown with those stars, hopefully our 18000+ spectra will help unravel some of those mysteries...