Hi folks. There is a webinar hosted by Dr. Lauren Biddle of the University of Texas on the AB Aur campaign tomorrow (Sunday) at 2PM Eastern, 19:00 UTC. AB Aur is a 7th magnitude Young Stellar Object and the region of most interest in the spectrum is H-alpha. It seems like it's a good opportunity for spectroscopy by amateur astronomers. If you are interested in contributing, please try to attend. Dr. Biddle will tell us some about the AB Aur system, their work on it with McDonald Observatory and HST, and discuss some particulars of this year's AAVSO campaign. Plenty of time is set aside for questions and discussion.
Register for the webinar at this link:
https://us02web.zoom.us/webinar/register/4116999884483/WN_Vr3GfhiDRMSrQpGyvrzUlA
Clearest skies,
Walt
Walt, thank you for sharing this heads-up!
I've been discussing AB Aur spectroscopy with Dr. Lauren Biddle, and I'm starting to get pretty excited—I think I can actually make some valuable spectroscopic contributions to this campaign myself! High resolution is great, but not essential; it sounds like there is significant value in just getting equivalent widths. (Still, AB Aur's H-alpha line profile variations can be discerned without going to extremely high resolutions; I've already seen a nice example from an observer working at R~2000.)
We should have some more details about spectroscopy in time for tomorrow's webinar.
To anyone else wanting to follow AB Aur, I recommend registering for the webinar. In addition to covering some of the science of the system, Dr. Biddle is also planning to discuss data quality considerations and make observing recommendations. Should be fun!