ASTRO: Barnard's Star a Movie 7 years in the making

This is my annual update to my Barnard's star animation. Weather worse
than last year but by doubling the luminance it is now at least brighter
than last year but fuzzier. I've completely redone the animation. In
the past I used a common background only inserting Barnard's star and a
few stars around it for alignment. This made for a nice even move. So
even it looked fake. So this year I went back to original data. Lots
of variation in the starfield because of it. Text below is mostly a
repeat from prior years. The image scale is 1" of arc per pixel.

http://www.prairieastronomyclub.org/...BS2007-13a.gif

_________________

Barnard's star is the second closest nighttime star system to us at 5.98
light-years and the closest north of the celestial equator. It is a red
dwarf star thought to be over 7 billion years old possibly nearly as old
as our galaxy. While it's part of the sky, Ophiuchus, is easily visible
to virtually the entire world but for the south pole, it can't be seen
without a telescope. At about magnitude 9.5 in green light it is about
1/25th as bright as the faintest star we can see. It's claim to fame is
that it is the fastest moving star in the sky. It moves over 10" of arc
per year across our skies (1 second of arc is the size of a quarter at 3
miles). This "rapid" motion made it a candidate for looking for a
wobble in its motion caused by a planet or planets. This, long before
the spectroscopic wobble method was possible. Most found no planet but
Peter van de Kamp of Sproul Observatory at Swarthmore College using the
observatories excellent 24" refractor did. This caused a great interest
as the first exo planet discovered when first announced but it soon
dissolved into controversy when the others failed to verify it or the
second he later claimed to have found.

I was at a Midstates Astronomical League convention at which he spoke
about his "discovery" in 1970. I remember it well as when opened for
questions, which he seemed not to want to answer, I asked about the lack
of confirmation with larger scopes and the possibility of systematic
errors. I was told in no uncertain terms they had accounted for all
such errors and was made to feel as if I had questioned God. The glare
I got was deadly, as sharp as his curt answer. It pretty much squelched
the question period. Now we know that it likely was just about what I
suggested. Each time the lens was cleaned the two elements were
separated then put back together again, the star wobbled. Analysis of
the images showed a similar displacement of other stars with each
cleaning. Many stars in the field wobbled. An obvious sign of some
sort of error. Though he went to his grave certain of his discovery.

Still he refereed the very paper showing the wobble in other stars in
the field. He was scientifically honest, just blind to his errors. Not
an uncommon failing of us humans. In fact he suggested there was a
second half Jupiter sized planet involved even after others were saying
something was amiss with his first discovery. Today's Doppler
measurements show no sign of a companion (possible if it orbits in a
plane perpendicular to our line of sight). However no other telescope
has detected his wobble, including Hipparcos which was many times more
sensitive than his telescope. Nor did the HST find any sign of a
Jupiter or half Jupiter sized companion which is within its
capabilities. We now know some math shortcuts he took (this was before
astronomy department computers) compounded minor errors into big ones.
His "discovery" may be dead but I still have nightmares about the glare
I got for questioning his "discovery."

The frames making up the animation vary greatly in time and number. I
tried to equalize Barnard's star in the frames and ignored what this did
to the rest of the field. This made making the movie extremely
difficult. In the 1912 version I gave up and used the best frames for
the background and only inserted the star and those within a half minute
of arc or so of the star into this background. So you'll see the stars
right around Barnard's star change with each animation step but not the
background. I found this less annoying than the entire field varying
greatly. For the addition of the 2013 year I used my somewhat improved
techniques to give another try at equalizing the vastly different
images. After several days of work and a lot of false starts I have
something sort of usable. I hope the star variation isn't too annoying.
Matching color under the varying conditions only added to the problem.
I see now why virtually all animations of this star use mono images.
Color makes it a major pain in the backside. The 2013 data was taken
August 3 at 03:42 through 04:56 UT. I'd only intended to use 2
luminance frames but clouds so reduced the brightness of the images I
ended up taking 4 and still had a worse signal to noise ratio than for
most of the other years when I used only one or two.

http://www.prairieastronomyclub.org/...BS2007-13a.gif

Rick
--
Prefix is correct. Domain is arvig dot net

Rick,

good job on maintaining a steady starfield. That star is really fast!
Too bad you didn't catch it while doing a looping ;-)

Stefan

"Rick Johnson" schrieb im Newsbeitrag
...

This is my annual update to my Barnard's star animation. Weather worse
than last year but by doubling the luminance it is now at least brighter
than last year but fuzzier. I've completely redone the animation. In
the past I used a common background only inserting Barnard's star and a
few stars around it for alignment. This made for a nice even move. So
even it looked fake. So this year I went back to original data. Lots
of variation in the starfield because of it. Text below is mostly a
repeat from prior years. The image scale is 1" of arc per pixel.

http://www.prairieastronomyclub.org/...BS2007-13a.gif

_________________

Barnard's star is the second closest nighttime star system to us at 5.98
light-years and the closest north of the celestial equator. It is a red
dwarf star thought to be over 7 billion years old possibly nearly as old
as our galaxy. While it's part of the sky, Ophiuchus, is easily visible
to virtually the entire world but for the south pole, it can't be seen
without a telescope. At about magnitude 9.5 in green light it is about
1/25th as bright as the faintest star we can see. It's claim to fame is
that it is the fastest moving star in the sky. It moves over 10" of arc
per year across our skies (1 second of arc is the size of a quarter at 3
miles). This "rapid" motion made it a candidate for looking for a
wobble in its motion caused by a planet or planets. This, long before
the spectroscopic wobble method was possible. Most found no planet but
Peter van de Kamp of Sproul Observatory at Swarthmore College using the
observatories excellent 24" refractor did. This caused a great interest
as the first exo planet discovered when first announced but it soon
dissolved into controversy when the others failed to verify it or the
second he later claimed to have found.

I was at a Midstates Astronomical League convention at which he spoke
about his "discovery" in 1970. I remember it well as when opened for
questions, which he seemed not to want to answer, I asked about the lack
of confirmation with larger scopes and the possibility of systematic
errors. I was told in no uncertain terms they had accounted for all
such errors and was made to feel as if I had questioned God. The glare
I got was deadly, as sharp as his curt answer. It pretty much squelched
the question period. Now we know that it likely was just about what I
suggested. Each time the lens was cleaned the two elements were
separated then put back together again, the star wobbled. Analysis of
the images showed a similar displacement of other stars with each
cleaning. Many stars in the field wobbled. An obvious sign of some
sort of error. Though he went to his grave certain of his discovery.

Still he refereed the very paper showing the wobble in other stars in
the field. He was scientifically honest, just blind to his errors. Not
an uncommon failing of us humans. In fact he suggested there was a
second half Jupiter sized planet involved even after others were saying
something was amiss with his first discovery. Today's Doppler
measurements show no sign of a companion (possible if it orbits in a
plane perpendicular to our line of sight). However no other telescope
has detected his wobble, including Hipparcos which was many times more
sensitive than his telescope. Nor did the HST find any sign of a
Jupiter or half Jupiter sized companion which is within its
capabilities. We now know some math shortcuts he took (this was before
astronomy department computers) compounded minor errors into big ones.
His "discovery" may be dead but I still have nightmares about the glare
I got for questioning his "discovery."

The frames making up the animation vary greatly in time and number. I
tried to equalize Barnard's star in the frames and ignored what this did
to the rest of the field. This made making the movie extremely
difficult. In the 1912 version I gave up and used the best frames for
the background and only inserted the star and those within a half minute
of arc or so of the star into this background. So you'll see the stars
right around Barnard's star change with each animation step but not the
background. I found this less annoying than the entire field varying
greatly. For the addition of the 2013 year I used my somewhat improved
techniques to give another try at equalizing the vastly different
images. After several days of work and a lot of false starts I have
something sort of usable. I hope the star variation isn't too annoying.
Matching color under the varying conditions only added to the problem.
I see now why virtually all animations of this star use mono images.
Color makes it a major pain in the backside. The 2013 data was taken
August 3 at 03:42 through 04:56 UT. I'd only intended to use 2
luminance frames but clouds so reduced the brightness of the images I
ended up taking 4 and still had a worse signal to noise ratio than for
most of the other years when I used only one or two.

http://www.prairieastronomyclub.org/...BS2007-13a.gif

Rick
--
Prefix is correct. Domain is arvig dot net