AAVSO Photometric All-Sky Survey (APASS), underway since 2010,
covers the entire sky from 7.5 < V < 16.5 magnitude, and in the BVugrizY
bandpasses. A northern and a southern site are used, each with twin ASA
20cm astrographs and Apogee Aspen CG16m cameras, covering 2.9x2.9 square
degrees with 2.6arcsec pixels. Landolt and SDSS standards are used for
all-sky solutions, with typical 0.02mag calibration errors on the bright
end.
Data Release 10 is a complete reprocessing of all 500K images taken with
the system, including hundreds of nights not part of DR9. Sextractor is
used for star finding and centroiding; DAOPHOT is used for aperture
photometry; the astrometry.net plate-solving library is used for basic
astrometry, supplanted with more precise WCS that utilizes knowledge of the
optical train distortions. With these changes, DR10 includes many more
stars than prior releases.
More information is available at http://www.aavso.org/apass.
This brief tutorial shows you how to quickly add proper motions and
photometry from Gaia to (almost) any object list using the Virtual
Observatory. The VO protocol most suited to this kind of this is TAP
("table access protocol") and lets you transfer data and queries to
database servers. In the example, we will be using TOPCAT as a client.
There is no lock-in to it: There are libraries and other tools
allowing an integration of TAP operations into arbitrary workflows –
that's what standards are about. Tutorial supplements apply the
techniques to Simbad, show how to use TAP from Python, and introduce
UCDs.
The VO client Aladin offers powerful facilities of creating an
astrometrical calibration to images lacking WCS (World Coordinate
System) information. This tutorial shows how to go about doing this
for an image of the Ring Nebula in Lyr.
The BeStars project contains (1) the complete catalogue of classical Be stars, BeSC, with some of their fundamental stellar parameters, and (2) a database, BeSS, which assembles classical Be star spectra obtained by professional and amateur astronomers at any wavelength, epoch, and spectral resolution.
The BeSS database assembles classical Be star spectra obtained by professional and amateur astronomers at any wavelength, epoch, and spectral resolution.
This data collection contains fits (both good and bad) that were
found during R. J. Wilson et al's grant from NASA's Cassini Data
Analysis Program (NNX12AG90G).
