YSO Field Monitoring; seeking collaborations

Affiliation
American Association of Variable Star Observers (AAVSO)
Fri, 04/15/2022 - 13:33

I’m an active DSLR observer, with 59 YSO stars observed weekly. I’m accumulating a tremendous volume of high quality images of these fields in FITS format. I’ve begun monitoring these fields for any long term changes in nebulosity and possible star formation, using blink comparison.
This is a lot of time consuming work- I’m looking for help. I’ve been at it for a year and a half so far, and hope to continue until my equipment gives out. I’m looking for interested individuals to blink the images I’ve created and report any changes. I can provide all the images, fully processed- they only need to be registered and blinked. Volunteers would need a computer and image-processing software with a blink routine, like AIP4Win. Please reply if interested-thanks!

 

Affiliation
American Association of Variable Star Observers (AAVSO)
     Alas, lots of folks are…

     Alas, lots of folks are doing something similar, and collecting similar large amounts of data --- the proverbial drinking from a firehose problem.  You will probably have to work on the reductions yourself.  If your fields are relatively fixed and done in a highly consistent manner, then you should investigate various software options that will do reductions auto-magically (almost!).  An example is the Michael Mommert 'photometrypipeline', but there are numerous others, such as Sean Brennan's recently developed 'AutoPHOT', described here:

https://arxiv.org/abs/2201.02635

These basically will do astrometric solutions, identify stars, and do on-chip photometry against existing catalogues like the Pan-STARRS 'refcat2' or others to set the zero-point/color-term on each image.  You might also post this query to the AAVSO 'instrumentation and equipment' and/or 'photometry' forums, where various software wizards are more likely to see it.

\Brian  (who follows about 80 T Tauri stars, mostly in Taurus)