Sunday, December 19, 2021

Algol Eclipse

Forgot to mention that I observed and measured a recent eclipse event of Algol on 5 Dec 2021 using cameras from my all sky system.

The results are very promising.

This first plot shows the brightness of Algol (black dots) and the brightness of a nearby reference star (red dots):


I can then use differental photometry to calculate a magnitude difference, and I get this:



The magnitude difference is just:

M2 - M1 = -2.5 log10 (I1 / I2)

where the M's are the magnitudes and the I's are the measured intensities.

I was able to just catch mid-eclipse, and it looks like the maximum difference is about 1.3 magnitudes, plus or minus about 0.1 magnitudes.  Looking up the actual numbers, I see that the difference is 1.27 magnitudes!  My conclusion is that I'm able to make accurate measurements with a decent amount of precision.


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