Forum der Vereinigung der Sternfreunde

Hi all,

Malin and I are happy that we can announce a new Pro-Am-Campaign on the Yellow Hypergiants, especially rho Cas!

The story behind this campaign is that we both are interested in doing some work on real science. So we started in November 2017 a brainstorming. The result is based on the idea to work on a object(s) that is bright enough for small equipment and circumpolar for the region of Germany.
Additionally the object and questions on it had to fit our spare time and of course weather conditions. That means an observation about all five to seven days if the weather allows.

So we came up with the Yellow Hypergiants. It is a rare class of stars that are thought to develop blueward.
After some own work on this idea we contacted Anna Aret and Indrek Kolka from Tartu observatory, two professional Astronomers working on the Yellow Hypergiants and with M. Kraus and G. Maravelias authors of the latest paper, we found about rho Cas.
After some correspondence we had the idea to start this campaign.

We attach an announcement letter. There you can find all necessary information for contribution on this project.

This thread will be to inform on new things of the campaign. We also want to inform via blog format on the spectroscopy web page belonging to this forum.
For discussion we will establish a new thread in the observations section.

Cheers
Malin and Christoph

Hallo,

I observed the star HR8752, ( HD217476 ).

I send here some graphics to R=9000

1.- A general vision, range 3980 to 7759 Angstroms.

2.- Ha in emission

3.- It's appreciated a blue-shift in the Ha.

4.- Na doublet, double lines.

5:- Main zone to observe, 6300 to 6600 Angstroms.

Regards, Joan.

I send here also the file _hd217476_20180717_922_J. Guarro, if it can be interest to you.

J.G.

Hi Joan, hi all

thank you! Really nice data I think it could be very usefull, but if you are able to, please try to fit the agreements on the information we need about the data.

And for further discussions let us use the observations section, because we want use this thread for important announcements on this campaign.

We had already done some work on rho Cas and want to present it in the next days. But we still have some work to do on the infrastructure like the blog and so on.

Cheers
Christoph

Hello,

we have some news on this project! Our monitoring from February 2018 on leads to a first success. We got this message from Anna Aret:

Dear colleagues,

Michaela’s application for photmetric observations of rho Cas with BRITE satellites was successful. The BRITE observations will be executed in the period 7.8.2018 - 3.2.2019 at least once per night. Earth-based spectroscopy for the same period would be highly valuable. The star seems to be in a pre-outburst state.

Best regards


Anna

Cheers
Malin and Christoph

Great!!!

Hello,

here are some more news and answers (@Robin) from Anna on our project, particular about the BRITE observations!

Dear colleagues,

In addition to Tartu and Ondrejov observatories also Shamakhi observatory has joined the campaign. They have 2m telescope (twin of the Ondrejov telescope) with high-res echelle spectrograph. It is possible that astronomers from the Kazan university could also be interested.

Both rho Cas and V509 Cas will be observed by BRITE, 6 Cas will not. V509 Cas is barely in the available brightness range, but 6 Cas is too weak for these observations.

Concerning publishing: this project is lead by Michaela Kraus (Ondrejov observatory), who is consistently publishing in top astronomical journals, see http://stelweb.asu.cas.cz/~kraus/bibliography.html Perhaps it could serve as an additional assurance.

Best regards,

Anna

Cheers
Christoph

Hi Christoph,

There seem to be some amateurs like Joan with experience in producing pro quality reduced spectra who might be interested in joining the campaign but have spectrographs which produce raw data that you cannot reduce yourself. Have you considered accepting their reduced data, perhaps with a comparison with the professional data for a particular night to check for quality? (I assume you will not be asking for raw data from the professional observatories )

Robin

Hi all,

we now have for discussions a subforum viewforum.php?f=121 in the forum Observations for this project. There one can also write in german or other languages (for translations DeepL does a good job). Robin, I answered you there

Cheers
Christoph

Here is my effort from last night.

Any comments ?

Regards,

Jack

Huggins Spectroscopic Observatory UK