Observation Proposal (part 2)
Daniel Wysocki • • assignment
I have updated my proposal from last time.
I had mistakenly chosen a telescope at CTIO, when I had meant to choose one at KPIO.
I am also now restricting myself to the V- and I-bands.
In calculating the needed exposure times, I have assumed the brightness is constantly its faintest (4.37 mag), the highest airmass (14), a seeing of 10 arcseconds, and a constant lunar phase of 7 days to new moon (half moon). I give room to obtain an SNR of 500. Based on these results, I find that the necessary exposure times are 0.04 seconds for the V-band, and 0.02 seconds for the I-band. Allowing for some time to change filters, I estimate that we may take 1 image every 5 minutes, and 1 image in both filters every 10 minutes.
ccdtime output:
Database: kpno.db Telescope: 0.9m Detector: MOSAIC1_1
Sum: 1 Arcsec/pixel: 0.42 Pixels/star: 777.0
Seeing: 10. Airmass: 14.0 Phase: 7.0
Filter Time Mag SNR Star Sky/pix Noise contributions
Star Sky CCD
U 37.57 4.4 500.0 267488.3 0.0 517.19 5.11 136.70
B 0.16 4.4 500.0 267443.8 0.0 517.15 2.26 136.59
V 0.04 4.4 500.0 267444.9 0.0 517.15 2.54 136.59
R 0.02 4.4 500.0 267450.1 0.0 517.16 3.51 136.59
I 0.02 4.4 500.0 267463.8 0.0 517.17 5.29 136.59
z 0.02 4.4 500.0 267557.5 0.2 517.26 11.61 136.59
I have also obtained some photometry from the AAVSO (photometry), with the intent of using it to predict what my observations will look light, and generate some artificial data. I ran the data through a package I helped create for fitting variable star light curves (plotypus), using the script aavso-fit.sh, which was run as follows:
bash scripts/aavso-fit.sh data/aavsodata_5611d453a3156.txt \
data/delta-cep.dat \
data/plotypus_table.dat \
img/This generated the following plot:
The proposal can be found here: