Sunday was a mostly sunny day but we had variable high and low cloud cover throughout the day. Sometimes the sunlight was filtered, but it was rarely gone long due to passing clouds. Winds were light. We had a low temperature in the upper 50's°F at sunrise and reached the low 80's°F during the afternoon. Dew Points were in the low to mid 50's°F all day, so once again the air was dry and comfortable. Cicadas were still buzzing away all day long; they probably won't be around much longer.
At sunset and dusk on Sunday there were just a few scattered clouds around, and I saw the Waxing Crescent Moon low in the Southwest once again. It was about 4.8 days since New Moon this evening.
Even though there were scattered high clouds around, I wanted to get at least one look at SY Andromedae tonight. Since I made two estimates in the hours near mid-eclipse last night, I wanted to see it a few hours prior to it returning to "normal" brightness tonight (the eclipse should end around 3:00 AM tonight).
I had the telescope outside with the dew cap on, all plugged in, and pointed near M-31 in Andromeda by 9:30 PM. I was outside looking through the eyepiece at it not long after this and star-hopped over to the area of the variable.
One problem I had was that more bands of cirrus and some puffy mackerel type rows of cirrocumulus clouds were moving in. I kept checking to make sure this area of Andromedae stayed fairly clear of them. I believe my naked eye limiting magnitude was only about 4.5 away from the clouds, and the telescope limit was probably 13.0 or even less. Crickets and other singing insects were filling the air with sound. The Temperature was about 71°F, the Dew Point was 54°F, the Humidity was about 55%, Winds were Calm or nearly Calm, and the Pressure was 30.05".
9:47 PM (1:47 UT Sept. 29) - I estimated SY Andromedae as 10.9 magnitude. This wasn't a really easy estimate to make; the cirrus "murked up" the sky a little and made faint stars tough to see. I used 102x power. I could see right away that SY And was obviously brighter than the nearby 11.9 star (the approximate magnitude of the star at RA 00:13:17 Dec +43:43:58 that I used last night). It took a long time to compare it to the 11.1 star (the approximate brightness of TYC 2794-1345-1), but after a lot of long looks, I decided SY And was slightly but definitely brighter than this star. It was much fainter than the 10.3 star (the approximate brightness of TYC 2794-2356-1). The ratio seemed to be about 10.3 - 3/4 - SY And - 1/4 - 11.1. I'm certain that the accuracy of this estimate lies at +/- 0.01 mag. I used Chart 11953BPA. I'm certain I saw it just below it's usual magnitude out of eclipse.
This was the only estimate I made tonight. I thought about leaving the telescope outside and looking again in a few hours, but by now the sky was full of those mackerel cirrocumulus clouds and larger thin altocumulus clouds. There's still a weak disturbance moving through Indiana generating those clouds and a lot of stronger systems closer to the Gulf Coast that are sending clouds through the area as high pressure parked now pretty far to our east keeps bringing mild air from the south into the Ohio Valley. As it turns out, I had the telescope in for the night at 10:00 PM Sunday evening.
I should point out that this was the 4th time out with the telescope since last Tuesday morning the 23rd. I've now made 14 estimates for the Fiscal Year, which ends this Tuesday morning. 13 of those estimates were made in the last 6 nights. At least I'm in the double-digits and, as bad as those numbers are, I'm finally making progress in observing neglected eclipsing variable stars! I think I'll have much more success with variable star observing in the next year, not to mention other amateur astronomy.
No comments:
Post a Comment