Thorium hollow cathode lamps (HCLs) are used as frequency calibrators for many high resolution astronomical spectrographs, some of which aim for Doppler precision at the 1m/s level. We aim to determine the most suitable combination of elements (Th or U, Ar or Ne) for wavelength calibration of astronomical spectrographs, to characterize differences between similar HCLs, and to provide a new U line list. We record high resolution spectra of different HCLs using a Fourier transform spectrograph: (i) U-Ne, U-Ar, Th-Ne, and Th-Ar lamps in the spectral range from 500 to 1000nm and U-Ne and U-Ar from 1000 to 1700nm; (ii) we systematically compare the number of emission lines and the line intensity ratio for a set of 12 U-Ne HCLs; and (iii) we record a master spectrum of U-Ne to create a new U line list. Uranium lamps show more lines suitable for calibration than Th lamps from 500 to 1000nm. The filling gas of the lamps significantly affects their performance because Ar and Ne lines contaminate different spectral regions. We find differences (up to 88%) in the line intensity of U lines in different lamps from the same batch. We find 8239 isolated lines between 500 and 1700nm that we attribute to U, 3379 of which were not contained in earlier line lists. We suggest using a combination of U-Ne and U-Ar lamps to wavelength-calibrate astronomical spectrographs up to 1um. From 1 to 1.7um, U-Ne shows better properties. The differences in line strength between different HCLs underline the importance of characterizing HCLs in the laboratory. The new 3379 U lines can significantly improve the radial velocity precision of astronomical spectrographs.
Uranometria Argentina catalog of bright southern stars
Short Name:
V/135A
Date:
21 Oct 2021
Publisher:
CDS
Description:
In 1879 Benjamin Apthorp Gould published in Buenos Aires, Argentina, the Uranometria Argentina catalog of 7756 stars south of declination +10 degrees. This included all those stars he considered magnitude 7 or brighter and some fainter stars which are close companions to brighter stars or to each other and have combined magnitude 7 or brighter. Star positions are in 1875 coordinates, and constellation boundaries also in 1875 coordinates were defined within the aforementioned declination range. With only a few small changes these were incorporated into the boundaries adopted by the IAU in 1930 and subsequently universally accepted. In terms of accurate photoelectric magnitude measurements the Uranometria Argentina is nearly complete to magnitude 6.5 in its declination range. In each constellation the individual stars considered to be magnitude 7 and brighter were numbered in sequence of increasing right ascension in 1875 coordinates, except that in a few cases this sequence was somewhat adjusted so that stars close together could be listed on adjacent lines of text. The numbering system is analogous to that in the Flamsteed Catalogus Brittanicus and now widely used. Star numbers from the Uranometria Argentina rarely appear in the 21st century despite the potential utility of their use. They were included in the American Ephemeris and Nautical Almanac until 1978, and in the FK5 catalog until 1999, always with the letter G following the number in the Uranometria Argentina catalog. This serves to distinguish Flamsteed numbers with no following letters from Gould numbers, and is utilized in this presentation and recommended for general use. The file catalog.dat includes every star in the original Uranometria Argentina. In the original the constellations were presented in sequence of increasing distance from the south pole and numbered accordingly. For the convenience of 21st century astronomers the constellations are presented here by alphabetical sequence in constellation name and the stars in each constellation in the same sequence as in the original. A separate file notes.txt includes a large number of notes for individual stars and for groups of stars recognized in the original catalog as belonging together. Each note is referenced by an asterisk * in the file catalog.dat. Columns 43-63 provide J2000 coordinates and cross identifications from the Flamsteed, HD, and SAO catalogs for the stars and have been added by the author of this data set. Columns 82-154 have been copied verbatim from the Uranometria Argentina catalogue, except that where asterisks are shown errors in the original printed catalogue have been corrected and the originally published values are stated in the notes. Two publications state corrections to the printed Uranometria Argentina. These are by B.A. Gould, Astronomische Nachrichten 116, 379-382 (1887AN....116..379G), and by T. W. Backhouse, Astronomical Journal 12, 112 (1892AJ.....12Q.112B). All of these, and a few others, mostly typographical misprints found by the present author, are presented in this digital version.
Catalogs of 145 astrometric positions of Uranus and 4 its moons U1-U4 and 62 positions of Neptune and Triton have been compiled with Tycho-2 as a reference frame from photographic observations obtained at the Main Astronomical Observatory, National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine, in 1963-1990. Astronegatives have been digitized with an Epson Expression 10000XL commercial scanner in 16-bit grayscale with a resolution of 1200 dpi. Reduction has been performed in the LINUX-MIDAS-ROMAFOT software supplemented with additional modules for the precise positional determination. The internal positional accuracy of the reduction is 0.04-0.25" for both coordinates and 0.21-0.65m for photographic magnitudes of the Tycho-2 catalog. Gallery of plate images used for catalogs: http://gua.db.ukr-vo.org/catalog_gallery.php?catn=neptun_1963_1990 http://gua.db.ukr-vo.org/catalog_gallery.php?catn=uran_1963_1990
URAT is a follow-up project to the successful UCAC project using the same astrograph but with a much larger focal plane array and a bandpass shifted further to the red. Longer integration times and more sensitive, backside CCDs allowed for a substantial increase in limiting magnitude, resulting in about 4-fold increase in the average number of stars per square degree as compared to UCAC. Additional observations with an objective grating largely extend the dynamic range to include observations of stars as bright as about 3rd magnitude. Multiple sky overlaps per year result in a significant improvement in positional precision as compared to UCAC. A URAT1 release paper for the Astronomical Journal is in preparation. URAT1 is an observational catalog at a mean epoch between 2012.3 and 2014.6; ot covers the magnitude range 3 to 18.5 in R-band, with a positional precision of 5 to 40 mas. It covers most of the northern hemisphere and some areas down to -24.8{deg} in declination.
The URAT Parallax Catalog (UPC) consists of 112177 parallaxes. The catalog utilizes all Northern Hemisphere epoch data from the United States Naval Observatory (USNO) Robotic Astrometric Telescope (URAT). This data includes all individual exposures from April 2012 to June 2015 giving a larger epoch baseline for determining parallaxes over the 2-year span of the First USNO Robotic Astrometric Telescope Catalog (URAT1) (Zacharias et al., 2015, Cat. I/329) published data. The URAT parallax pipeline is custom code that utilizes routines from (Jao, C.-W., 2004, PhD thesis Georgia Stat), the JPL DE405 ephemeris and Green's parallax factor (Green, R.M., 1985, Spherical Astronomy) for determining parallaxes from a weighted least-squares reduction. The relative parallaxes have been corrected to absolute by using the distance color relation described in (Finch et. al, 2014, Cat. J/AJ/148/119) to determine a mean distance of all UCAC4 reference stars (R=8-16 mag) used in the astrometric reductions. Presented here are all significant parallaxes from the URAT Northern Hemisphere epoch data comprising of 2 groups: a) URAT parallax results for stars with prior published parallax, and b) first time trigonometric parallaxes as obtained from URAT data of stars without prior published parallax. Note, more stringent selection criteria have been applied to the second group than the first in order to keep the rate of false detections low. For specific information about the astrometric reductions please see 'The First U.S. Naval Observatory Robotic Astrometric Telescope Catalog' published paper (Zacharias et al., 2015AJ....150..101Z, Cat. I/329). For complete details regarding the parallax pipeline please see 'Parallax Results From URAT Epoch Data' (Finch and Zacharias, 2016, AJ, in press). This catalog gives all positions on the ICRS at Epoch J2014.0; it covers the magnitude range 6.56 to 16.93 in the URAT band-pass, with an average parallax precision of 4.3mas for stars having no known parallax and 10.8mas for stars matched to external parallax sources. This catalog covers the sky from about North of -12.75{deg} declination. This catalog was matched with the Hipparcos catalog, Yale Parallax Catalog, (Finch & Zacharias, 2016, AJ, in press), MEarth (Dittmann et. al., 2014ApJ...784..156D) and the SIMBAD database to obtain known parallax and star names. For stars matched to SIMBAD using the automated search feature, only the parallaxes are given so no information on the parallax errors or source for the parallax are reported for those stars in this catalog. A flag is included to show which catalog or database the URAT parallax was matched with. Only the data from the first catalog that was matched is reported here according to the following priority list. This means for example, if a star was matched with Hipparcos, that information was used while possible other catalog data are not listed here. -------------------------------------------------------- # stars flg catalog -------------------------------------------------------- 53500 0 no catalog match 55549 1 Hipparcos 254 2 Yale Parallax Catalog 1041 3 Finch and Zacharias 2016 (UPM NNNN-NNNN) 1431 4 MEarth parallaxes 402 5 SIMBAD Database (w/parallax) -------------------------------------------------------- 112177 total number stars in catalog -------------------------------------------------------- Not all parallaxes from the URAT epoch data are included in this catalog. Only those data meeting the following criteria have been included. For the epoch data we only used data having a FWHM<=7.0pixel; amplitude between 500 and 30000ADU; sigma x,y <=90.0mas; number of observations >=20 and epoch span>=1.0 years. The limits imposed on individual image amplitude, image profile width (FWHM) and position fit errors (sigma) are set to not allow saturated stars, stars with too few photons or poorly determined positions to be used in the parallax solution. We present all URAT parallax solutions having a known parallax from an external data source regardless of the quality of the solution (srcflg=1-5). This was done for the user to better understand the limitations for determining parallaxes with the current URAT epoch data. For the remaining URAT parallaxes without a match to any published trigonometric parallax (srcflg=0) we only present a parallax solutions having: 1) a parallax error <=10mas 2) a parallax error <=1/4 the relative parallax 3) epoch span >=1.5 years 4) number of observations used >=30 5) fit sigma<=1.4 (unit weight) 6) average image elongation <1.1. All of these cuts have been implemented in an attempt to lower the number of possible erroneous parallax solutions entering our catalog. However, the URAT reduction process does not take provisions for close doubles (blended images) of arcsecond-level separations. Many of the parallaxes, particularly those with large mean elongation, large parallax error, large fit sigma and many rejected observations are possibly blended images leading to a higher chance of an erroneous parallax solutions. A visual inspection of all residual plots and real sky images would not be practical for the entire catalog. However, we have included information in the catalog to help the user to determine if a solution should be investigated further.
Proper motions are computed and collected in a catalog using the Hipparcos positions (epoch 1991.25) and URAT1 positions (epoch 2012.3 to 2014.6). The goal is to obtain a significant improvement on the proper motion accuracy of single stars in the northern hemisphere, and to identify new astrometric binaries perturbed by orbital motion. For binaries and multiple systems, the longer baseline of Tycho2 (~100yr) makes it more reliable despite its larger formal uncertainties. The resulting proper motions obtained for 67340 stars have a consequent gain in accuracy by a factor of ~3 compared to Hipparcos. Comparison between UrHip and Hipparcos shows that they are reasonably close, but also reveals stars with large discrepant proper motions, a fraction of which are potential binary candidates.
We present a large-area photometric survey of the Ursa Minor dwarf spheroidal galaxy and its environs. This survey is intended to trace the distribution of stars outside the nominal tidal radius of this system. Observations were made with the Washington M, Washington T2, and DDO51 filters, which in combination have been shown to provide reliable stellar luminosity classification for K-type stars.
Optical spectroscopic observations of the recurrent nova U Scorpii during its outburst in 2010 were obtained during 0.83-162.5 days after outburst maximum. Three spectra were obtained during pre-outburst quiescence. This paper discusses these observations along with optical polarimetric and radio continuum (610MHz, 1280MHz ; GMRT) data obtained during the 2010 outburst.
We present the results of a deep ZYJ near-infrared survey of 13.5deg^2^ in the Upper Scorpius (USco) OB association. We photometrically selected ~100 cluster member candidates with masses in the range of 30-5 Jupiters, according to state-of-the-art evolutionary models. We identified 67 ZYJ candidates as bona fide members, based on complementary photometry and astrometry. We also extracted five candidates detected with Visible and Infrared Survey Telescope for Astronomy at YJ only. One is excluded using deep optical z-band imaging, while two are likely non-members, and three remain as potential members. We conclude that the USco mass function is more likely decreasing in the planetary-mass regime (although a flat mass function cannot yet be discarded), consistent with surveys in other regions.
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