Useful astronomical data from star trail pics?

[jeremyll33]

I've recently started to play with my Canon EOS 350D, zip them together in "Startrails.exe" then Photoshop them using the levels subcommand. I plug an old Nokia phone earpiece into the relevant jack socket then go back inside while it captures images for me on its tripod, this below is Cassiopeia from tonight.

Now apart from the fun derived in this activity (I am learning lots about flats of which I took five this time, I can't help thinking there must be uses for this easy activity. Perhaps variable star eclipsing binary magnitude crude photometry on Algol for example?

I understand that asteroidal occultations can be superimposed from the observers line of latitude to gain an outline of the asteroid. Can simple star trails be used to capture asteroid occultations?

[FraserClarke]

Absolutely. Lots of things you can do with wide field imaging data like this. Variable stars, asteroids occultations (though these are pretty rare), even gamma-ray bursts! these will all potentially show up in your images. However, it's probably easier ignoring the star trails aspect, and just treating it as a set of images. You can then just measure the brightness of stars in each image, and make a plot of brightness vs time. The important thing will be how faint can you see in a single image?

Algol is certainly possible. The eclipse lasts for about 10 hours though, so might be tricky to cover it all in a single night. There are systems with shorter eclipse, but I don't know if there are any as bright as Algol?

[derekorion]

There's an occultation of a star sigma1 tauri in Taurus in the early morning of Sunday at 00:44 BST, by asteroid Susumu.  

On the night of Saturday, September 9 at 23:44 UT (00:44 BST on September

10, 2017) the asteroid (6925) Susumu (mag 17.8V) is predicted to occult star

sigma(1) Tauri (HIP 21673, mag 5.1V).