The Betelgeuse Project
Posted: Sat Feb 24, 2024 2:57 pm
So I went out tonight and tried to capture a change in the brightness of Betelgeuse.
20240224.5 UT
Visual
First I did a naked eye visual comparison of
Betelgeuse [Mv 0.5]
Hadar, [Mv 0.61]
Procyon, [Mv 0.34]
Achernar. [Mv 0.46]
Aldebaran was behind trees.
Assessment:
To my naked eye, Betelgeuse [Mv 0.5] seemed to be between Achernar [Mv 0.46] and Hadar [Mv 0.61] and at lest than 0.1 mag difference, any difference in the stars brightness was indistinguishable to my eye.
In 2019, Betelgeuse was very noticeably fainter than it should be and easily detectable to the naked eye.
___________________________________________________________
Photometry
Then I captured exposures of: -
Betelgeuse [Mv 0.5]
Hadar, [Mv 0.61]
Procyon, [Mv 0.5]
using a fully manual 200mm f4 lens set to infinity withDSLR set to ISO100 1/8s
I may defocus and tape the focus and increase the exposure to 1/4s to even out the light field for future measurements.
The trick is to get the exposure of the stars somewhere in the middle of the grey scale. You definitely do not want the star saturated. By using such a short exposure, I can use a camera and tripod only. No tracking mount required.
I then used Lightroom to readRGB levels and I reduced the data. This is a crude but effective method of photographic photometry demonstrated by the linear regression of the brightness between the three stars that span only 0.15 mag. If Betelgeuse was not on it's nominal brightness, the point for Betelgeuse would not form a linear regression line with the other points. So for now, no change in brightness. The strange brightness numbers are because I converted the logarithmic base 2.512 magnitude measurements to a linear scale.
Joe Cali
20240224.5 UT
Visual
First I did a naked eye visual comparison of
Betelgeuse [Mv 0.5]
Hadar, [Mv 0.61]
Procyon, [Mv 0.34]
Achernar. [Mv 0.46]
Aldebaran was behind trees.
Assessment:
To my naked eye, Betelgeuse [Mv 0.5] seemed to be between Achernar [Mv 0.46] and Hadar [Mv 0.61] and at lest than 0.1 mag difference, any difference in the stars brightness was indistinguishable to my eye.
In 2019, Betelgeuse was very noticeably fainter than it should be and easily detectable to the naked eye.
___________________________________________________________
Photometry
Then I captured exposures of: -
Betelgeuse [Mv 0.5]
Hadar, [Mv 0.61]
Procyon, [Mv 0.5]
using a fully manual 200mm f4 lens set to infinity with
I may defocus and tape the focus and increase the exposure to 1/4s to even out the light field for future measurements.
The trick is to get the exposure of the stars somewhere in the middle of the grey scale. You definitely do not want the star saturated. By using such a short exposure, I can use a camera and tripod only. No tracking mount required.
I then used Lightroom to read
Joe Cali