lukeEdfarley

2 minutes ago, lukeEdfarley said:

oh whoops mistake number 1 thanks..... on the other hand, I do live in Cumbria and I'm worried it might exceed the memory allocated to a float :)) 

in that case it would be a sink

9 minutes ago, pete_l said:

I see in your code you have RAIN defined as a constant ☔
Surely it can't be that wet???

oh whoops mistake number 1 thanks..... on the other hand, I do live in Cumbria and I'm worried it might exceed the memory allocated to a float :)) 

2 minutes ago, Alien 13 said:

Do we know what causes these dimming events, is it due to a large number of sunspots/change in size of the star or something else?

Alan

not sure whether Betelgeuse is a specific case but yes in general, my understanding is and please correct me if I'm wrong is that variable stars contract and expand and hence their brightness changes. the rate at which this happens is called the fundamental frequency, the higher frequency variables tend not to be as bright as the lower frequency variables however off the top of my head i cannot remember what that relationship is called.

hope this somewhat helps,

Luke.

I've almost finished mine which i have programmed using an arduino stuck a few bits of sample code together and low and behold it works just waiting for a waterproof box.

it pushes data over Ethernet  to a thingspeak channel found here: https://thingspeak.com/channels/946107  (not currently posting... postage from china is slow)  however you can see from the data that it has been tested.. Note that it is powered off POE

the instruments that are attached to the arduino 

https://coolcomponents.co.uk/products/weather-meters?variant=45223104590&utm_medium=cpc&utm_source=google&utm_campaign=Google Shopping&gclid=Cj0KCQiAgebwBRDnARIsAE3eZjRq_YFXpQOY6nWw2Mamc3M9UD_rvIhB0A7_27_-ovVrTHsouv5umtUaAtvaEALw_wcB

https://www.sparkfun.com/products/13956

and the arduino Ethernet shield

if you're interested i can compile a full components list but you get the idea

you said you wanted wifi which i also thought about then i realised that ethernet was also a good power solution  

in terms of code attached is a word-pad file (so you don't need to download the compiler to view it) with the code i mashed together... sorry this is less than graceful work aha

I'm then mounting the whole thing on the side of the house so it breaks the crest (hopefully the house wont get in the way of the wind that way) personally ive done bits  with the pi in the past and have found the arduino easier to work with but that's just my preference

hope this helps,

Luke.

wordpad sketch copy.rtf

2 hours ago, robin_astro said:

There would still be much of interest from a spectroscopic point of view though and something that bright would give professionals a big headache.  Even with my equipment I am not sure how I would cope. I would probably have to resort to defocusing and sampling the defocused image using the spectrograph slit as I did for Vega with this simple setup here for example

http://www.threehillsobservatory.co.uk/astro/spectroscopy_18.htm

(Off topic in this sub forum though)

Robin i looked at your work and it looked absolutely fascinating. i really liked the experiment which you ran looking at the crab nebula, at the frequency of pulses from the pulsar in the centre! More on topic, how would the spectra vary with time would the light to begin with be very low wavelength as the debris gets further away the photons get less energetic? how does it work?

1 minute ago, Paul M said:

Most of the intense radiation of the core collapse is screened from us by the outer layers of the star. Those take time to be disrupted and be ionized and eventually ejected into space by the core collapse. What does escape immediately is the glut of neutrinos created at that moment. They are effectively mass-less and beat everything else out of there. 

Don't worry. Apparently there are neutrinos passing through us in great numbers all the time. They won't wait to be focused by a telescope or captured by a CCD chip. They'll carry on their merry way, mostly!

 

no haha they only bother with 100+ft of concrete or strangely i believe the detectors use water baths in caves but im not sure where i read that

anyone here??

9 hours ago, robin_astro said:

Supernovae put out a lot of light though (Around a billion or so times more luminous than the sun at visible wavelengths)  so yes, around the brightness of the full moon by  the time it gets here.  Something with the apparent size of a star in the sky producing as much light as the full moon will be painfully bright.

ah right cool, i wonder how bright something has to be in order to cause problems for newt mirrors, course larger telescopes must be more susceptible to this.

https://www.rp-photonics.com/laser_induced_damage.html 

is an interesting page that outlines damage due to lasers.

I am aware that if you point a mirrored telescope at the sun without a filter in front you get some interesting burnt mirror arromas! 

the object you describe is very small but very bright so very intense, when this is reflected onto the secondary mirror will surely this intensity will go up could this pose a problem?

On 09/01/2020 at 08:02, Owmuchonomy said:

As far as I know it’s actually brightness when SN can only be roughly estimated so maybe yes, maybe no. Interestingly, imaging shows that it’s axis of rotation is not pointed at Earth otherwise we would be in serious danger of being hit by high energy radiation such as gamma. I also saw a presentation of a century of magnitude data which suggests the current dimming is not unusual. It’s a hot topic though 😎😁.

whoop my first ever post! anyways yes i heard the same thing...   the dimming is not unusual its the speed of the dimming they're getting excited about a bit of reading has told me that when it finally explodes it will be about half as bright as a full moon... (idk whether that prediction has any truth) however none the less rather spectacular me thinks. at the end of the day it's quite a long way away and considering intensity diminishes with the square doubt it will be blinding. that might be me underestimating supernovas though :)) it may be nice though a moon filter! haha.