Proxima centaurus

[Terry B]

Since 2001 I have taken occasional images of proxima centaurus with the plan of demonstrating it's propper motion. I have created a little animation of 6 frames taken between feb 2001 and June 2007. The animation is pretty crappy but I'm no expert at making the animations. It certainly demonstrates the obvious propper motion of the closest star to us.
The field is about 6 arcmin high.

[troypiggo (Troy)]

Wow. That's fascinating. I had no idea they'd move that much relative to each other of just a few years.

[multiweb (Marc)]

Not one to align on

[Inmykombi (Geoff)]

Excellent work there.
I too had no idea that it could move so much in less than a decade.

Well done, your dedication has paid off.

[RobF (Rob)]

That's awesome Terry! Thanks for showing.

I must admit I didn't realise you could see (or image) Proxima C. Must read up on it. I always thought it was a tiny companion of the alpha C system.

[Terry B]

It's a long way from alpha cent.
The position on my image from 2004 was 14:29:40.79 -62:40:43.5 (J2000)
It obviously has moved a bit since then but it is reasonably bright at about V mag 9.

[h0ughy (David)]

that is a huge project and well done - full credos to you for your efforts

[theodog (Jeff)]

Cracker of a project.
Well done Terry.

[sheeny (Al)]

What a top project!

Very cool!

Al.

[Hagar (Doug)]

What a corcker Terry. Move it certainly does.... I thought they pretty well sat stationary. You live and learn. Thanks

A big project. Well done.

[Octane (Humayun)]

Terry,

Mind = blown.

It's almost scary to think that it has moved so much.

Knowing the distance to the star and the motion (in pixels) have you been able to ascertain how far it's moved in the 8 year period?

Regards,
Humayun

[OneOfOne (Trevor)]

Given that the orbital period around AB is of the order of millions of years (?), I expect would that mean Alpha would have moved by the same amount. So a similar time lapse of this system would show the proper motion, as well as a little orbital motion....you didn't happen to take similar shots of Promima's big brother and sister? I expect also the two are too far apart to be shown in the same field and be able to show the proper motion.

Very mind blowing sequence, not many deep space objects move over a persons lifetime, let alone a few years.

[Ric]

Excellent work Terry, I'll look forward to seeing future additions to the animation.

Cheers

[Terry B]

Originally Posted by OneOfOne

Given that the orbital period around AB is of the order of millions of years (?), I expect would that mean Alpha would have moved by the same amount. So a similar time lapse of this system would show the proper motion, as well as a little orbital motion....you didn't happen to take similar shots of Promima's big brother and sister? I expect also the two are too far apart to be shown in the same field and be able to show the proper motion.

Very mind blowing sequence, not many deep space objects move over a persons lifetime, let alone a few years.

No I didn't take images of alphacent. It is much too bright. The exposures were all about 20 secs. Alpha cent takes an exposure of 0.1 sec and then background stars can't be seen to measure against.

[Terry B]

Thanks all.
The original idea when I took the images was to see if I could demonstrate the stellar parallax of the closest star. Unfortunately I was not very rigorous in obtaining images and then the star was hidden by trees etc. If taken 6 months apart I should have been able to see the side to side wobble.
The image points are not well distributed in time.

They were taken on

26/02/2001 1/04/2001 14/05/2001 9/08/2001 21/02/2004 16/05/2005 3/05/2007 23/06/2007
The attached graph is RA vs Dec of each image. You can certainly see the parallax between the first 3 points and the 4th point taken about 6 months later.
Note some of these frames are not in the animation due to positioning issues.

[RobF (Rob)]

It just gets better and better. You've obviously captured lots of people's imagination with this one Terry!