Re: ConCams

[Tom Droege <tdroege2@earthlink.net>]

I have accumulated about 9000 V,I image pairs since I started taking "good" 
data.  Most of these are taken at +7.5 degrees North, and now cover 20h to 
12h.

One of the things on my "highly speculative" list is a search for optical 
transients.

I have been thinking about what might come out of this work.  Here is what 
I can see:

1) A list of fixed stars with some high probability that they are fixed.
2) A list if variable stars with some probability of variability
'
'
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274) Stereo distance measurements to fast moving NEO
275) An optical transient search result.

 From my observation of the AAVSO list, 1) would be very useful to them as 
comparison stars.  I read lots of reports on the list about comparison 
stars being suspected to be variable.  I did not put "discovery of new 
planets" on the list because we do not yet know how good the photometry 
will get.

Thus 1) is at the top of my list as a solid result candidate.

Tom Droege


At 12:44 PM 1/23/02 -0700, you wrote:
>Having *two* simultaneous exposures, as done with the Mark IV,
>is much more convincing when it comes to transient events.
>The concam pixels are very large, and I would bet that confusion
>with satellite glints and cosmic rays must be a real problem.
>In addition, the fisheye has very little aperture, and the
>limiting magnitude is not much better than the human eye.
>   Finding and confirming optical flashes is a hard project.
>You want to go deep, yet cover a large area.  Then software to
>pick out those events that occur in two cameras, have a stellar
>profile, yet don't belong to any known astronomical object, is complex.
>Going the other way -- knowing a transitory event should have
>occurred in some specific location in the sky at some specific
>time -- is possible, and we have done that on several GRB events,
>both with ConCam and with StarDial.  That is probably one reason
>why we should keep Mark IV images around even after data extraction.
>Arne