Hello StarAnalyser-200 installed and ALPY-600 on the way

T CrB is low in the western evening sky now, so you may have to wait a few months and pick it up in the early morning sky.  Pre-eruption monitoring of this object is important to establish a baseline for which post eruption spectra can be compared.  On the Spectroscopy Observing Section page is a list of suggested objects for obtaining spectra, so take a look at that as well. 

For logging, I generated a log sheet that I fill out during my observing runs.  I found that I was being a bit sloppy in my notebook - sometimes not recording information that I needed later during processing, so I created a form that I fill out instead.  This keeps me consistent in recording information at the time of the observation, such as which reference star I selected for each target and the elevation angles of the target and reference.  Then when I'm doing the processing I don't use the wrong reference star to construct the instrument response curve (for example). 

Again, its all about developing good techniques for consistently producing quality spectra, so take your time in reviewing the available materials, participating in the group meetings, posting questions in this forum, and, most importantly, checking your results for quality and consistency.  When you've established your technical baseline for generating quality spectra you can then delve into the process of extracting information from the spectral signature to learn about the physical processes in play.

Scott

Lucas,

Short answer is "I don't know".  Hopefully someone with experience in obtaining spectra with a color camera can weigh in.

Scott

Lucas,

As you noted, the overlapping filter responses cause difficulties. It would certainly be possible to at least use color spectra to gain experience obtaining & reducing spectra. Another possibility that I don't know whether anyone has tried, would be to separate the three color layers into three images covering different wavelength ranges, then processing each separately (essentially treating them similarly to a 3 order echelle spectrum), each with its corresponding instrument response.

Wayne

You can use colour cameras but there are a number of disadvantages that make mono cameras far superior for spectroscopy particularly if you are wanting scientific accuracy

1. Overlapping responses of the three channels. This has been touched on and makes flux calibration (the fitting of the response curve) more difficult, particularly at very low resolutions where the humps and dips due to the overlaps can be confused with actual spectral features. 

Additionally the response of each channel is not limited to specific spectral regions. Each of the filters has leaks in other regions of the spectrum and all become transparent in the IR so the suggestion of taking each channel separately and then combining them rather like an echelle does not work.

2. The effective pixel size of colour cameras is 2x that of a mono camera. You need to consider this if you are potentially undersampled

3. The sensitivity of the colour camera is much lower because not all pixels are sensitive at any particular wavelength. (2x lower in the green and 4x lower in the red and blue) also because there are effectively gaps in the image where the non sensitive pixels are there is a greater risk of artifacts like small scale ripples in the spectrum

Cheers

Robin