Creating a personal sky survey for photometric historical data

Sat, 03/27/2021 - 16:46

I have recently read about a new nova eruption in a previously less significant area of the sky. This left me wondering: Is it possible that I have ever observed this part of the sky, and could contribute data from that time to a lightcurve?

 

For this, I would need a tool which can import many platesolved images I've taken over the years, let's say one per target observed, and overlay these images on the PC to create a view of the entire night sky. Parts of the sky which I have not ever observed would remain black. Then I would import this into a planetarium software, which would then allow me to enter object names and overlay my personal sky survey to check if they have ever been in my field of view over the years. 

Given how much value a tool like this provides for any time sensitive event where historical data before the event occured is valuable, I find it hard to believe that a convenient tool like this does not exist. It should be within every AAVSO imagers kit. What softwares out there can do something like this, and also importantly output in a form which I can input as survey data into a planetarium software? 

 

Leon 

Affiliation
American Association of Variable Star Observers (AAVSO)
Footprint servers

Perhaps it's not even necessary to display the images themselves in a sky-view, just draw a frame for all the images so you can check how many images, if any, cover a specific part of the sky.

This is called a footprint server; you can even use a ready made, hosted service like http://voservices.net/footprint/default.aspx and create (and share with others if you want) your own observations' footprints. The ideas behind this service are described in this paper:  http://adsabs.harvard.edu/pdf/2007ASPC..376..559B

Probably there exist other solutions like this one, but I guess that paper could be useful to check whether this is what you need.

CS

HB

 

Footprint servers

Hi Bikeman, 

this sounds like a good solution. Unfortunately I'm not able to create an account (required for "My footprints" at the top). I get a server error on clicking register both in Chromium and Edge. 

The transport failed to connect to the server.

Description: An unhandled exception occurred during the execution of the current web request. Please review the stack trace for more information about the error and where it originated in the code.

Exception Details: System.Runtime.InteropServices.COMException: The transport failed to connect to the server.

 

Do you know if this service is still online? On the sidebar I saw that the last change was in 2007. If not, I will search for alternative servers. 


Leon

Affiliation
American Association of Variable Star Observers (AAVSO)
oh oh it might actually be…

oh oh it might actually be offline, too bad.

 

On the other hand...it seems to create an account despite the error message, e.g. I could login afterwards....go figure...