Affiliation
American Association of Variable Star Observers (AAVSO)
Tue, 07/29/2014 - 01:58
What software can be used by amateurs for a nova search image analysis?
An automated nova search camera can easily generate an enormous amount of data which can be very difficult to manage manually. The traditional blinking of images would be very time consuming for one operator. There is also a concern that events may be missed in their early stage, when there is a small brightness differential, when assessing dense starfields.
Is there a software program, available to amateurs, that is able to assess the differential between a reference image and a test image and present the operator with candidates that require greater scrutiny?
Derek Kuhl
KDPA
Yes. I deeply agree your opnion.
We need nova search software to promote nova search to young amateuer astronomers.
In Japan, some (famous) nova searchers use a software to align target and reference images, And it can detect new objects. in semi-automatical manner.
Unfortunately, this softaware can not be avaiable for public due to some software licence issue.
I use sextractor to analyze my survey images. But it is not easy to use. We need some software skill to use such public softwares for nova search.
I thik that we need to new software which is easy to use for amateuer nova searchers.
During our "Vendégcsillag-kereső" (Guest Star Hunter) Programme I use VaST, that was developed by Kirill Sokolovsky:
http://scan.sai.msu.ru/vast/
Using VaST in the last 1.5 years we have developed some new variables - and several variable candidates -, but no novae yet (however Kirill and his colleague already discovered a nova in 2012). The list of our discoveries can be found here:
http://lmv.hu/Vend_variables
(Actually VaST - more or less - can be considered as a front end for SExtractor since most of the work is done by SExtractor in the background, but in reality VaST is more than SExtractor purely.)
Clear skies,
Robert