June 2019: a good month

June 2019 was the first month after several of bad weather and a broken Gemini I controler. After replacing it with the Gemini II, and also replacing the original Losmandy Titan mountmotors by stronger Maxxon ones, this month was the finetuning of the new version of the script taking into account those changes as well as a change in the guiding camera.

It is not working 100% yet but I have been abe to observe 20 nights during the month of june and acquire 65 spectra - not too bad considering the short nights during this month!

I have currently 48 spectra (1104 orders) pending validation in BeSS database... :-)

I hope july-september trimester will bring lot of clear nights and even more specrra with longuer nights coming. the season is nice for Be star spectra as Cygnus is rigin up in the evening now. And soon V442 And will be visible in the morning for me (I'll have to cut some trees to help!).

As weather is very very hot (the warmest with some record in France in june!), he pool is welcome as well.

reading before starting the semi-automated observing script

spectra waiting for validation in BeSS

 

Three months downtime

OK, it took a while for me to work on the Gemini II installation. Physical installation of the new telescope mount controling system and motors went easy. Software was more complicated!

First, ASCOM isn't compatible between Gemini I and Gemini II and I took lot of times because it looked so... At the end, I started from scratch. I took some time to find out that you need to set the mount as "Titan" in the Gemini and "Titan50" in ASCOM - now figue why... :-)

I was very surprised by the improvement in GOTO accuracy. With no pointing model, I am able to go from one target to another one within 40-60° and still have it in the small guiding field of view.

That's for the Gemini II installation but because of the three months downtime, I faced several (too many!) problems:

1/ WINDOWS (win10) was updated of course, it just never stops!

2/ when updating prism, AVIRA antivirus blocked update.exe software and I could'nt restore it so my best option was to get rid of Avira and use Defender instead... but so much time lost on this issue!

3/ With the current PRISM version, the OFFSET_TELESCOPE function doesn't work anymore, not sure why but it looks like a regression!

4/ ATIK drivers were updated and it now doesn't work in prism as ArtemisHSC.dll can't be found. I am able to use Ascom which may not be a bad thing as it better recognize each camera compare to direct driver interface. But the drawback is that now starting autoguiding from the script (STARTGUIDECONSIGNE) fails all the time and I can't figure out why. My only option for now is to have a manual interuption of the script to manually launch ans stop autoguiding so my observations are now less automated!


Anyway, I am now back to observation (I lost around 15 nights), but I have to wake up between each target for manual intervention... I hope to find a solution for this STARTGUIDECONSIGNE issue; one option is to replace the Atik Titan by another non Atik camera and see how it works...

Despite the better GOTO accuracy, the new system seems better in autoguiding and I have some surprising increase in light efficiency during the first nights I tested it. Almost 30% improvement in spectra SNR - I now need to reduce my exposure times to reach the SNR=100 target. Because it is less automated I am leaving the parameters as is but when I find a solution for the autoguiding, then it should increase the number of spectra per night.

Gemini II

Since february 27th, my mount was down due to technical trouble with the motors and the Gemini system. I decided to upgrade it with Gemini II and more porerfull Maxon motors. I just installed it today and used the same parameters as before (ie: same pointing model). It seems to work nicely!

I think I lost about 15 nights due to this issue. I hope the semi-automated script still work on this new system but I believe it should...

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...

Review of the year 2018

2018 has been the first complete year with the observatory fully functional. It is a good time to review what happend then.


Mid 2017 the observatory was bck to functional with the Losmandy Titan mount refurbished. I have then been able to observe manually through 2017 with very good success.

In september 2017, I invested in some equipment to do remote. This was a key milestone for more productive (and with warmer environment!) observations.

2018 started with a very very bad weather conditions. I was able to observe seriously in june. But a major turn occured in july as I developped a script for more automated observation including software control jump from one target to the next and of course all acquisition and autoguiding. At the beginning I gave th script a list of target to do. In september, I added the ability to select the next target based on its distance to current telescope position in the sky, the BeSS Be Star Spectra database current priority and my own priority (some bonus for some targets).

During 2018, I have observed 123 nights (partial or total), with more than 615 hours of total exposure time. My project (and only one - almost mono-maniac!) is the spectrscopy of Be stars. I thus acquired 536 spectra of Be stars (more than 12000 orders), reaching a total of 1361 spectra in BeSS and close to 30000 orders.

I reached #1 in number of orders in BeSS and top 3 for the number of spectra of Halpha in BeSS:

Based on all those observations, here is the updated graphs showing the observatory performance on Be stars in terms of SNR (Signal to Noise Ratio) versus Visual Magnitude.

Some sheeps around the observatory this last Fall: