Proxima project

[kinetic]

One of my imaging projects for several years now has
been to capture Proxima Centauri's motion against the background
stars over the course of a year.

Years ago I started to accumulate data at various focal lengths and
the data is quite a huge set. Pretty hard to manage and calibrate into
an animation without a lot of manipulation...and time.
One day I might get to it.

Until then I decided this year to do a set at an exact image scale every
month, the purpose being to have a set that is easily calibrated
and turned into an animation quickly.
So far I have 6 months worth.
I'm not quite sure how long I can go, I suspect at about the 9 or 10
month stage Centaurus will be in some sort of twilight or dawn so the
full year might have a 1 or 2 month gap.

This set has an imaging F.L. of 1524mm and uses my home cooled DSI II mono.
Only filter used is a Baader IR.
This is a crop of a fairly narrow piece of sky.
Understandably, a lot of curve manipulation and normalising is needed
to make up for imaging differences each month. Seeing/Moon/CCD temp etc.

Steve

[acropolite]

Nice work Steve, it's surprising how much movement there is. I look forward to watching your progress with this one. :thumbsup:

[samilag]

Interesting work Steve.
The movement is a lot and it's incredible to see a movement so big...

Congratulation for this activity and thank you to share this work

Giuseppe

[ChrisM]

Well done Steve. I don't think that I've previously seen monthly movement shown. I read recently that Prox will occult a couple of stars in the next few(?) months, so it will be interesting to see your animation over that period if the background stars are bright enough.

Chris

[Regulus]

This is very cool; quite exciting. Thanks.

Trevor

[RobF]

Wow, top stuff. I would have thought you'd be wasting your time doing anything less than monthly!

[Lee]

I really like this sort of thing - well done.... :thumbsup:

[DavidU]

Well done Steve :thumbsup:

[h0ughy]

what an awesome project, looking forward to the next update

[jsmoraes]

very interesting project. Congratulations. And continue for more time to complete your intention.

[trent_julie]

That's fantastic! It's nice to see some original thought in action.

Trent

[peter_4059]

Very interesting Steve - quite a lot of movement in only a few months.

[Suzy]

That was so awesome to watch!
Thankyou, I really enjoyed that Steve. :)

[astroron]

Nice work Steve :thumbsup:
Well done.
Cheers:thumbsup:

[beren]

That's great, cool project well done :)

[kinetic]

Thanks all for your kind comments.
Lets hope I can keep the sequence going!

Steve

[multiweb]

Cool sequence Steve. Always a thrill to see a star move. Awesome. :thumbsup:

[kinetic]

Here is July's set added to another
sequence. July's image wasn't easy! Weather conspired to
narrow my "month interval window"
I was finally successful on the 26th July. That was after a rapid
repair on a '97 vintage laptop that drives the scope in DOS. This lappy still
manages to fire to life after all these years!:thumbsup: Water had seeped in to
the keyboard and short some keys. Then the imaging monitor decided to
become a fishtank. When I removed it from the dome and held it upside
down, a stream of water poured out of it!
Winter in Adelaide is a cruel, evil mistress.......

The tracking of Proxima is now showing a slight curve. I expected this.
You can also see a background star being resolved that was obscured by
glare in a previous month's image.

August 18-26 will be my last opportunity to get another frame.
A river red gum is going to do me in next time.

Steve

[Solar]

Great Steve.
I like what you are doing.
Top effort. BY the way I have pretty good CHAINSAW not being used at present. Let me know. ( trim only).

[Matt Wastell]

Hi Steve
That is a great project - looking forward to Augusts addition!

[kinetic]

Thanks guys,

here is a rough ID of the area with an image I found of
Proxima's path over the years, overlaid.
My image is a close crop of my July set.
This is a tiny piece of sky!

Steve

[Ric]

Hi Steve

Fantastic work in what you have captured so far, definitely looking forward to seeing more of this project.

[kinetic]

Set added from 09 Jan 2014.

This shows 12 months of Proxima's proper motion.
Compare it to the yearly wobble image from post 21 to see exactly where
a January result would be in this wobble.

Steve

[astroron]

Good work Steve,sure does move a bit in such a short time.
Cheers:thumbsup:

[Lee]

Great work Steve.... I'll stay tuned every January for an update now :)

[cometcatcher]

That's very cool.

[Ric]

Nice work Steve

For a star it is sure moving quickly.

[LAW]

"That's no moon..." (or star):lol:

Very cool indeed!

[strongmanmike]

Great project and result Steve :thumbsup: now keep at if for a few years and pass the technique down through your family for a few generations.... and give us colour :P

In the words of the great Gelileo Galilei Eppur Si Move "And yet it moves" (or at least he is said to have said but probably didn't)

Mike

[astronobob]

Nice work Steve, Interesting the looping action in the diagrams, obviousely the angular view of earths orbit, which not only shows speeding up & slowing down, but also the Tilt of earths orbit in relation. a good star to work with being the closest to us.
Well done on such an interesting project :thumbsup:

[kinetic]

Thank you guys.
It is quite hard to make yourself believe this really is a star, a true star,
moving against the background of all of those other stars, not moving at
all...in a whole year.
Some perspective can really humble you sometimes.....

Steve

[kinetic]

A run of bad seeing for a week, still trying to get a decent Feb set.
For now, this Feb 8th set will do to add to the ongoing animation.

attached: December 2012 through to Feb 08 2014.
(GIF degraded due to file size limit)

Steve

[Amaranthus]

Terrific work. I'm trying to get a sense of scale though - what is the distance moved over the year, in arc seconds (or fractions thereof)?

[Lee]

Nice work Steve....

[kinetic]

Barry,

Proxima according to Wiki moves about 3775 milliarcsec/ yr in RA
and 769 mas/yr in Dec.

That's by no means the largest proper motion of a star.
Barnard's star is one of the fastest moving. 10,300 mas/ yr!
There is also motion due to our movement contributing to the picture,
mainly the cyclic wobble.

My DSI CCD at this image scale is approx 11 x 14 arc mins in scale and
approx 1.14 arc sec per pixel.

Steve

[AstroTourist]

I made a comparison over a three year period April 2010 to Aug 2013. See attached gif.
On the slide I have noted the proper motion. I scaled the actual motion off the image and it matched the prediction.
Fantastic to see the detail in your Project Steve. Well done.
Rgds.
Terry

[Quark]

What a great project Steve, impressive work indeed.

Regards
Trevor

[kinetic]

Thanks Trev and Terry and the regulars who keep checking in
for progress.:thumbsup:
March has been a bit difficult to get a set that wasn't affected by
moon, cloud or bad seeing...or all three ! :)

attached is an animation from Jan 2013 to March 2014.
A 2nd yearly cyclic curve is now evident.

Steve

[Clayton]

Nice work Steve :thumbsup::thumbsup:
And as others have said, nice to see something different :)

[kinetic]

Another 12 months on.
Here is 26 months of movement of our nearest neighbour.

Thanks Rob,

Steve

[astroron]

Great stuff. :thumbsup:

[geolindon]

Really cool, in many ways :thumbsup:

[strongmanmike]

Awesome Steve :thumbsup: you have to keep going now, every year until...well, you can't do it anymore :)

Mike

[Lee]

Hats off mate - another good effort....

[N1]

Of all things I've seen on this web site, this amazes me most!

[John Hothersall]

Nice work to get it monthly as it has some movement. Well Done Steve.

John.

[Matt Wastell]

On ya Steve - I like catching up on your progress.

[RobF]

Wonderful stuff for sure. Thanks for sharing with us Steve.

[Paul Haese]

What an awesome project. A superb demonstration of this stars movement. Well done Steve and I look forward to many more updates.

[kinetic]

Thanks guys for the comments.
Tonight I did a quick grab of Tycho using the same camera, (wound down to 0.001sec exposures!) to get a sense of scale.

Steve

[Ric]

Excellent stuff Steve, I always look forward to these updates.

[sil]

good project and keep at it. I did an analemma project a couple of years ago. the payoff is satisfying.

[kinetic]

An update from this evening's imaging set.

Steve

[Atmos]

Just caught up on the thread, fascinating! Love the work you've done so far, keep at it :)
Looks like it is getting pretty close to those two stars now :)

[Lee]

It has been a while between observatory sessions for me unfortunately, and my proxima project has stalled - thanks for keeping this up, it is great to see.... :thumbsup:

[kinetic]

Update,

5 Plus years now on this little project.
I'm now easily potentially capturing photons that started out around
January 2013 on their journey.

Steve

[xelasnave]

Fantastic effort.
Now I know why my stars are not round the little devils are moving.
Congratulations.
Alex

[strongmanmike]

Ice cold cool :)

[Paul Haese]

Yep that is really cool Steve. A clear demonstration that some stars move in the night sky even over a short period of time. :thumbsup:

[Lee]

Thanks for keeping this up - I never get sick of watching the motion of stars like this......

[bkm2304]

Congratulations, Steve. :thumbsup:

[trent_julie]

This is still one of my favourites well done!
Cheers

Trent

[Ross G]

Amazing work Steve!

Ross.

[kinetic]

Thank you chaps!
It is getting harder to remember the processing steps each time I add
a new result :)
I have a pattern I seem to follow but digging that out, deciphering it
and repeating it once or maybe twice a year is very time consuming.
Luckily I saved file names which give away what process I did.
As the file name gets longer I can see the train of work so to speak.
The most difficult process seems to be matching histograms or normalising
so the background stars and Proxima itself doesn't change in brightness too
much in the animation.

Steve

[Quark]

Brilliant work Steve!!!

[multiweb]

That is so cool. I've never seen monthly animations of stars either. I had no idea this one is moving so fast. Worth a look for sure with occultations. :thumbsup:

[kinetic]

Thanks guys,

Here is another perspective,
aligned on Proxima itself, 5 years animation.

Steve