Keeping updated on projects. Three categories: projects I'm currently working on, projects that I've started but are currently halted (for whatever reasons), and future projects piling up.
Current: lego sorting, bird flock flight tracking, meteor echoes
Background/halted: TESS steady stars, photometry (eclipsing binaries, asteroids, planetary moons), qNMR, TNO detection using stellar occultations
Future: speckle interferometry, asteroid occultations, meteor detection/tracking, satellite detection/tracking, twilight colors, radio telescope
There might be other inactive projects, but this is what I can think of....
Some details:
Lego Sorting: this is an active project which I'm documenting elsewhere (see this link). This project would generally make life for most Lego people much more enjoyable, and has huge commercial potential.
Bird flight tracking: at this point, this is more of just an interest to me than anything else. I enjoy watching large flocks of cranes spend their winters in my area as they fly overhead in their interesting and complex formations. I've written software to take video frame input, and detect and track the paths of birds (of any kind: cranes, swallows, pigeons, etc.) as they move across the sky. I'm especially curious to see how they move in relation to one another. Would some kind of biologist be interested in any of this?
Meteor echoes: I've written software that can take the audio from livemeteors.com and detect meteor echo events. The software can then make several measurements, including begin and end time, event duration, intervals between events, and peak and total amplitudes. I've written a draft report on what I've done sofar (available upon request). The only thing I'd like to add to this is to look at data from different times of year to see if I can detect any shower activity. Not sure what else to do with this. Unfortunately, it looks like this kind of observation is going away since it relies on TV stations emitting a signal on 'Channel 2' (55.24 MHz) or 'Channel 3' (61.260 MHz) -- which are going away in the next few months. I need to look to see if there are other ways to make similar kinds of observations.
TESS steady stars: everyone is hyperventilating (understandably so!!!) about the stellar activity seen by the TESS observatory. What's interesting to me is to find stars that show NO activity. Once found (I've already found several candidates from Sector 1), I'd like to understand WHY they're so steady (at least on the TESS timeframe).
Photometry: I started doing very well collecting data and making measurements, but if one of my goals is to publish this data to AAVSO, then it must be calibrated to one of the standard photometric standards (like UBVRI). At the moment, all I have is R, G, and B filters. There is a way to calculate the transformation functions between these two, but it looks like that produces uncertainties that make the measurements almost useless (at least at the moment). The way forward is to either acquire a set of UBV(RI) filters, and restart the photometric journey with these, OR use what I have and see if I can improve the accuracy & precision of the transformations. Regardless, in order to do accurate photometric measurements, I need to observe 'standard stars'. These are stars of known brightness and color (even though they might be variable -- see TESS above) that I can use to get 0th, 1st, and 2nd order extinction coefficients. It's all explained in an excellent book 'Astronomical Techniques' by Hiltner (see chapter 8). At this point I need to choose a direction and go with it. Once that's done, then wow there's a LOT of things that can be done, some of which I mentioned in my brief above.
qNMR: This is quantitative Nuclear Magnetic Resonance Spectroscopy. It's an analytical technique to tell me what compounds are in a prepared sample and how much of each compound there is. Current testing labs primarily use High Pressure Liquid Chromatography (HPLC) and a combination of Gas Chromatography (GC) and Mass Spectroscopy (MS). These methods are expensive and slow and are virtually blind to the contents of the sample. qNMR will revolutionize how chemical analysis is done -- especially samples that are complex (food, soil, plants, etc.). Huge commercial potential.
TNO detection: I've got software that takes orbital information of any object (TNOs or otherwise) from the JPL Horizons website and calculates position (RA and DEC), distance (AU), apparent size (micro-arcsec), apparent velocity (mas per second), time it takes to move one object diameter (depends on apparent size and apparent velocity), and maybe other things too. The first goal is to get back to where I was a couple of years ago and come up with an occultation rate given a certain number of TNOs and stars. The ultimate goal is to find an indirect way (alternative to direct imaging which for most of these objects will be impossible since they're so small and therefore so faint) of detecting TNOs.
Radio Telescope / Interferometer: I'd like to build a radio telescope and do the same kinds of things I'm doing in the optical -- photometry, etc. Start simple and go from there. My property is about 660 ft on each side (it's an almost perfect square of 10 acres), so I have a diagonal of about 900 feet (about 275 meters). Radio Jove is set up for 20.1 Mhz, which has a wavelength of 14.915 meters. Therefore, the resolution of this interferometer would be 1.22 lambda / D = (1.22 * 14.915) / 275 = 0.06616 radians, or 3.79 degrees. Not great resolution, but probably something can be done. I know very little about radio astronomy when it comes to hardware and data, so in order to get this project going I'll need to do a lot of homework first. First step might be to do a Radio Jove kind of project just to get my feet wet.
I recently acquired a ZWO-ASI385MC from a very generous friend. This will allow the following four projects to move forward. I'll need to acquire a dedicated Win10 machine to run this.
Speckle Interferometry: this is mainly just to do it. For those of you that don't know, SI is a post-processing technique to sharpen astronomical images. I did this as a student 30 years ago and hardly understood what I was doing. My understanding and knowledge has grown a little since then, and I think I can at least get to a level where I'm satisfied with the results. But due to the small aperture sizes, I'll be limited to pretty bright targets (I might be able to get to 5th magnitude with the video-rate exposure times I need to 'freeze' the atmosphere). Small aperture also means only a few speckles. With an 8" primary and normal seeing, I'd expect to see about 10 speckles on average. Targets will include binary stars, Jupiter (using it's moons as point sources), and that's about it. Not sure what else to do with this.
Asteroid occultations: these don't require as short exposures as speckle does. I'll need to test this, but I'm guessing that a 0.1 second exposure will get me down to about 8th mag. That's still pretty limiting since there aren't many 8th mag stars or brighter that get occulted. I'd like to observe occultations of stars by trans-Neptunian objects (TNOs) since those occultations are usually a pretty long (10's of seconds, or minutes) so I could increase the exposure time to see fainter stars (which means more occultation opportunities). The most important thing about asteroid occultations is the timing.
Meteor and Satellite detection and tracking: the ZWO camera comes with a fish-eye lens that appears to have a pretty wide field of view. This means it has the potential of being used as an all-sky camera. This opens up the possibility of satellite and meteor observations, but also non-astronomical observations like clouds, birds, and other transient events. This could also be used in the twilight project. Meteors could be measured (brightness profile, color, location in the sky, motion, etc.). Satellites observed can have their positions measured and compared to calculated orbital data. Orbit changes or unknown satellites could be observed.
- Using IRIS data to map the south atlantic anomoly
- Twilight observations: this is a project I did for someone several years ago, but was stopped because the effect they were expecting / looking for didn't appear. However, how the sky color changes at various stages of twilights caught my interest and I'd like to get back on that to see where it leads me. The ZWO camera can be used for this, too.
- Obtain occultation timing spacially not temporaly
